


Back to the Beginning

by ancientroots



Series: At Points In Time [3]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-29 10:47:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6371746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancientroots/pseuds/ancientroots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In his first year of university, Nijimura Shuzo comes to terms with (or ignores) his estrangement from his family. Meanwhile, the death of a yearmate begins a process by which Akashi Seijuro re-evaluates a life defined by victory.</p><p> </p><p>And then there were the enemies. The ones you thought you wouldn’t lose to. You underestimated them. And they won. Maybe they cheated. Maybe they won fairly. But they won, over and over again. (Sometimes, for an important thing, they only won once.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Back to the Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> Reference is made to: Akashi and Other Animals by half_sleeping.
> 
> Also, this work would be difficult to understand without reading the first and second stories in the series: At The End, and As Many Times.

**Back to the Beginning**

 

 

_“It’s not that you want to win. It’s that you have to. That’s the crunch, isn’t it? You can lose. But every loss builds up, weighs heavier, crystallises some fragile, vulnerable place inside you – your ribs, your head, your breath – that’s made of a childish fear. And not just fear, don’t get me wrong.”_

 

The first few months of university were neither as bad nor as good as Shuzo had envisioned them being. Waseda’s economics and political science program was challenging, sure – Shuzo hadn’t even thought he’d get into the university in the first place, but his homeroom teacher had encouraged him to take the entrance exams anyway – and the basketball training was tough. But these things were more or less as Shuzo had expected. The rest of whatever people tended to find difficult about university – making new friends, adjusting to a strange city, learning to pay bills and buy groceries and basically live on his own – he’d done it all before. America had been as foreign as foreign could get. And with Shuzo’s mother as the family’s sole breadwinner, and his father in hospital, it had been natural for Shuzo to take over some things that adults normally did. It wasn’t as if paying bills and buying groceries and cooking were hard things to learn how to do.

 

All of these things then – these were more or less as Shuzo had expected.

 

It was the loneliness that was difficult. His cheap student apartment that he’d rented by himself, because no one else he knew was going to Waseda and the on-campus dorms were more expensive than he wanted to pay for. The fact, difficult to ignore, that his family’s house was less than twenty minutes away by bus – and, another fact: he wasn’t welcome there since he had entered university. Kou and Sachi were both gone to Hokkaido for high school; only their mother was there. And Shuzo had told her, months ago, almost a year ago, that he no longer cared what she thought of him.

 

Not caring was proving harder than he had thought.

 

Tatsuya was in the States, in a timezone that made it difficult to arrange more than infrequent Skype calls and the occasional phone messages.

 

Sei was in Kyoto, three hours away by train, but lately unreachable. Shuzo had expected that too. Third year of high school, and it was not as if Sei did not have a habit of obsessing. His boyfriend had his university entrance exams, the shogi 3-dan league competition, his final Inter-High to think about. And what was it Sei had said more than a year ago – if I am absolute, it is because I make myself so.

 

The memory made Shuzo smile, in moments snatched between lectures, classes, study sessions, basketball practices, and the odd social gathering. It didn’t make him feel any less alone.

 

The quiet in his apartment, sometimes, when he paused in studying or watching basketball games on his laptop, was loud enough that it seemed a solid thing. Even the open windows, allowing the drift inside of the rumble and cough of passing vehices, the glare and shift of neon lighs and street lamps, and the thick soup and baked smell of ramen and pizza from the shoplot across the street – wasn’t enough to break through that solidity, crack and dissolve it.

 

At times, he was inexplicably afraid that in this solid, crystalline isolation, he would forget the sound of his own voice. His name.

 

And then, the next morning, he would get up and go to school. And a classmate would bow politely, or smile brightly, or wave a hand from the other side of the lecture hall, and say, “Nijimura-san,” and that would be the end of that particular fantasy.

 

Shuzo learned to ignore it. The immovable feeling of loneliness. He messaged Tatsuya over Line a little more often. Set himself a goal of calling Sei and his siblings once a week. Accepted more invitations to go out from people in his classes and in the basketball club. He didn’t make any real friends. No one he really clicked with.

 

He accepted that. Ignored, along with the loneliness, the voice in his head that suggested that, perhaps, he had become unable to let himself make friends with other people. It was not as if he told these people from his classes and in the basketball club – Nakamura, Asakura, Kinjo, Matsumoto, Takeda, Watsuji, their names and faces blurred in his head – anything about himself. And wasn't that – he’d known this instinctively from a young age – the best way to connect with anyone?

 

The voice in his head was joined by another one. One which said: he’d felt alone long before entering university. Possibly since the day that he had stood in the doorway of his mother’s kitchen, and said: “You win.”

 

One day in late May, two months after he had walked through the gates of Waseda University, set up in his own apartment maybe twenty minutes away from his family’s house in the Tokyo suburbs, Tatsuya looked at him, thousands upon thousands of miles away over Skype, and said, “Shuu, are you okay?”

 

It was blunt, to the point. Tatsuya was tired, lately. More irritable. He’d gotten into the Division I university he’d applied for. UCLA, only an hour or two from where his own family lived. But it was proving difficult to get off the benches, onto the court itself. Tatsuya’s natural sense of inferiority frayed his temper, made his tongue sharper and more precise that it already was.

 

Shuzo hesitated. A moment. His thoughts had drifted, briefly, as Tatsuya talked about basketball, to an economics essay he had due on Monday morning. It had been set a week ago, and he was about half done. A combination of other work and procrastination.

 

The question caught him out. In the darkness of his single-room flat – he tried to only use his desk light, keep the electricity costs down – the reminder of solid quiet, lurking in the corners of the room, creeping below the open window, waiting under the bed, was sudden and jarring.

 

He said, finally, “I’m fine. I just told you –”

 

“That your work and everything is fine,” Tatsuya said. “I know. I heard. You sound fine, I know. But you don’t –” Skype was lagging a bit; Tatsuya’s mouth moved slower than his words came across the connection. His expression shifted in slow motion. Different shades of exhaustion. “You don’t sound fine. I don’t even fucking know what I’m saying.”

 

Shuzo’s fingers hurt. He had dug them into the old wood surface of his desk. The blue light of the laptop screen hurt his eyes, briefly. The solidity in his chest expanded.

 

Then contracted. Controlled itself.

 

Shuzo rested his head on his other hand. Said, easily, “You should go to bed, moron. What time did you say you have to wake up tomorrow? Stop worrying about useless things and sleep.”

 

“Have you talked to Akashi?”

 

“I call Sei on Sunday afternoons. Not that that –”

 

“That’s not a bloody answer,” Tatsuya snapped. “Have you _talked_ –” And then he paused. His dark eyes narrowed. Skype made the movement grainy, slow. The connection in Shuzo’s flat was bad at night. A mystery the landlord had proven unable to fix.

 

Tatsuya turned somewhere off-screen, brought his phone into view. As Shuzo watched, his friend scrolled. Up, down. Up, down. He said, “You message me twice a week. Skype maybe once. Call Akashi on Sunday afternoons. You said just now that you and your bratty siblings email three times a month. And you haven’t made any new friends –”

 

“You haven’t either,” Shuzo pointed out, irritated. His fingers disengaged from the desk. “Tatsuya –”

 

“You’re doing it again,” his friend said. In counterpoint to Shuzo, the annoyance had bled from his voice. It didn’t make the precision any less sharp. But his gaze was softer. The alien surroundings of his room through the Skype window – a room the physical dimensions of which Shuzo could only imagine – were brightly lit. “Like those first months after your dad died.”

 

“Tatsuya,” Shuzo said. Took his head off his palm, steeled his expression.

 

“It’s your mother, isn’t it?” Incisive. At the same time, gentle. Of course Tatsuya would be the first – before Shuzo himself. “Shuu –”

 

All of it – his studies, basketball, friends, independence – had been more or less as he had expected. These past two months.

 

Shuzo shut it down. The conversation. He could do that now. Close the lid of the computer. The blue-white light cut off. He was in darkness. Afterimages of the screen flickered in front of his eyes for a moment. Two.

 

He took a deep breath.

 

 

 

 _More than just fear. A mercilessness. A lack of forgiveness. You can’t just_ lose. _The loss has to be a judgement of who you are, your worth as a person. If you lose, you don’t deserve to exist._

Seijuro had done everything exactly as it should be done. After he found Iwakura Yukari with her wrists slit in the student council room, he had ordered the other council members, filing in behind him, to stop gawking, to fetch a teacher. And then he himself had called 119. Iwakura-san had been taken to the hospital in a timely fashion; there had been little uproar on campus.

 

And she had died.

 

It was unfortunate that Tetsuya was a second cousin of the deceased. And that, therefore, when Seijuro was invited to attend the funeral in Tokyo over the weekend, his former teammate was unavoidably present.

 

Tetsuya, unlike Ryota or Satsuki or Daiki, was not the kind to cry or become otherwise passionately emotional at a funeral. He approached Seijuro after the casket had been lowered into the ground, and said, expression as unchanging as it had been throughout the service, “Akashi-kun, if you have a moment.”

 

“My condolences on your loss,” Seijuro said, politely. “And, of course, condolences from the rest of the Rakuzan student body. Iwakura-san was valued as president of the disciplinary committee.”

 

Tetsuya only blinked. Murmured a quiet thank-you. He and Iwakura-san had been but second cousins, Seijuro observed. It was unlikely that they had been close.

 

“Akashi-kun,” Tetsuya said, “I heard that Yukari-san left you a message before she died. A letter beside her –” he paused.

 

Seijuro allowed the pause. Derived an unnecessary satisfaction from it. The awareness – inside himself – of this satisfaction rankled. He needed better control over himself than that.

 

Wind swept over the grass. White movement, a sound much like the sea. They were not alone, the two of them. The sun shone down on a crowd of heads, caught in its over-warm breath a dozen low-voiced conversations. Someone, a little boy, was sobbing into his father’s trouser leg. “Nee-chan,” the boy said. “Nee-chan’s not dead, right, Tou-san? She’s not.”

 

Seijuro folded his arms loosely over his chest. Met Tetsuya’s gaze. “The letter was addressed to me, yes.”

 

“Oba-san –”

 

“I have spoken to Iwakura-san’s parents. They were very reasonable.”

 

“Akashi-kun,” Tetsuya said. Gently. “I wanted to know how you feel about it.”

 

“Do you believe, perhaps,” Seijuro said, not gently, “that Iwakura-san’s words had substance to them? I would be disappointed in you if that were true, Tetsuya.”

 

“I don’t believe it. But what I believe isn’t the point.”

 

Summer was encroaching. The weather was becoming increasingly hot. Seijuro was sweating in his formal suit and blazer. Takayama-san was waiting at the entrance to the cemetery with the air-conditioned car. Seijuro needed to board a train in a matter of hours in order to return to Kyoto for the beginning of the school week.

 

He reached up, loosened his tie, and smiled at Tetsuya. “I assure you, I am aware that Iwakura-san was not in her right mind at the time. I have not taken her words to heart. It was a pity that she could not be helped. She was –” he realised only when the words were out that he was repeating himself, “– valued as president of the disciplinary committee.” He forced himself to continue speaking. A pause would indicate weakness. He did not let himself dwell on what defined that weakness, in this situation. “She was also, as I understand, a well-loved classmate, and in my own experience, a respectable shogi opponent.”

 

“Nee-chan,” the little boy was saying. Still tugging at his father’s trouser leg. Iwakura Kaito was quiet. Had failed to respond to his only remaining child for a few minutes now. It made Seijuro inexplicably angry to see it.

 

He looked away from the scene. Kept his smile on his face. “I must leave now, Tetsuya. Unfortunate as these circumstances are, it was reassuring to see that you are well. Please give my regards to your coach and teammates at Seirin.”

 

Tensions between Tetsuya and himsef had eased over the past year, since their conversation behind Teiko’s sports hall. Tetsuya, Seijuro was aware, continued to hold out hope that Seijuro would ‘recover’ himself – that person who he had been in their first year of middle school. But even as the hope remained, the pressure had decreased; Tetsuya no longer took that recovery as a precondition for any further attempts at friendship. Slowly, but surely, he had begun to insinuate himself into Seijuro’s life once again, much in the same way that Ryota had done, though Tetsuya’s methods were by far the less irritating. Text messages asking advice about diet or training. Photographs of Nigo, the puppy the Seirin team had adopted two years ago.

 

It was a reminder to Seijuro, in some ways, that choosing to secure victory over the Generation of Miracles had been Tetsuya’s means of overcoming himself. Recognising his helplessness, his cowardice, in the face of the problems their team had faced during the Teiko years – and confronting it.

 

Seijuro did not have to agree with it – the effectiveness of the method, or Tetsuya’s presumption in believing that simply achieving victory using his kind of basketball would erase all that had happened between them – to respect the decision.

 

He liked to believe that, in the same manner, Tetsuya did not have to agree with the person Seijuro had become in order to respect that he was different from whom he had once been. And that this new identity was not broken, or misled, or otherwise unworthy. It was a state of existence.

 

The sun was high in the sky. Takayama-san was waiting. The train to Kyoto was leaving at five o’clock in the evening, and Seijuro’s father had desired to see him before he left.

 

Tetsuya held his gaze. His eyes were a pale blue. A year younger than Seijuro and the rest of the Generation of Miracles due to his pre-April birth date, he had always been the runt of the group, smaller than even Seijuro, and certainly physically weaker.

 

His voice was like iron. “Akashi-kun. I understand that we aren’t friends in the same way as we were in Teiko. It would be easier for you to talk to Nijimura-san, perhaps, or Mayuzumi-kun or Mibuchi-kun. They understand Akashi-kun better as Akashi-kun is now. But,” and then he smiled. It was more genuine than Seijuro’s. “If you would like to talk to me, I want you to know I would be happy to listen. Any time.”

 

 

 

_Your parents started it, seeing you not as a person but only as a daughter, a son. A vessel for their expectations. Fulfilling those expectations – going beyond them to destroy the competition without possibility for their getting up again – made it worse, because victory was stripped of any kind of pleasure or challenge. Winning became a mechanical inevitability. Just as your parents wanted._

_And then there were your friends. You lost your friends. Because either they were as brilliant as you were, and realized, just like you, the futility of that brilliance. The suffocating_ frustration _of it_. _Or they were weaker, and they envied you, and gave way to you, and left._

_And then there were the enemies. The ones you thought you wouldn’t lose to. You underestimated them. And they won. Maybe they cheated. Maybe they won fairly. But they won, over and over again. (Sometimes, for an important thing, they only won once.)_

Shuzo finished his essay in the faculty library on Sunday morning. He was meant to call Sei in the afternoon, around five-thirty. It was around noon now. He hefted his schoolbag over his shoulder, climbed the cement staircase to his one-room apartment, fitted the key in the lock. His phone was dead in his pocket; he had put it on silent last night, out of cowardice or something else.

 

The door slid inward. Light crept in a diagonal line across the wooden floor, touched the edge of the tatami mats further inside.

 

Shuzo hesitated. The quiet of the apartment.

 

He stepped back. His flat was on the second floor of a two-level apartment block, a door down from the cement staircase that connected the ground to the upper floors. The street running by the front of the building was noisy and dusty at this time of day, even on a weekend.

 

The first door down swung open. Shuzo’s neighbour, a senpai from the medical faculty at Waseda, edged out, a load of books in his arms. He glanced in Shuzo’s direction, grinned brightly, and said, “Nijimura. Help me.”

 

“Hirano-senpai,” Shuzo greeted. Took the top four books from him. Glanced at the cover of the first one. It was a life science textbook. “What are you doing?”

 

“Throwing away stuff,” his senpai said, easily.

 

Hirano-senpai was a sixth year medical student. He had passed a raft of exams at the end of his fourth year, and was now doing rotations through the different departments at the university hospital. He had exams again the following March, and then the Kokushi licensing exam, and then he would be a doctor.

 

Shuzo adjusted the books in his arms.

 

Hirano-senpai had dyed his hair blond a few weeks ago. Shuzo had been surprised to see it, but his senpai had said that it was a dare. He would dye it black again in a couple of months.

 

Shuzo’s phone was dead in his pocket. The afternoon, creeping from spring into summer, was unusually hot. The shadows at the corners of the landing, the staircase, were unusually dark in comparison. Shuzo’s head felt light. He blamed it on the starkness of the colours, and his lack of sleep he night before. “Senpai –”

 

“I’m dropping out,” Hirano-senpai said. “From medicine.”

 

The third book Shuzo was carrying was hard-cover. The edge dug into his skin. “You’re dropping out,” he repeated, dumbly. Wanted to bite his tongue immediately afterwards.

 

Hirano-senpai was not a lonely person. Or an anti-social one. Shuzo had seen people come and go from his apartment more or less frequently over the brief two months of their acquaintance. When they passed each other on the stairs or the landing, he was often on his phone, would wave off Shuzo’s polite bow.

 

But for some reason, he seemed to think that he wanted to say this to Shuzo, and not to someone else. “I decided that I can’t do it. I thought I could. I passed the exams. Made it through a year and two months of the training. But –”

 

The weight of the books strained.

 

Hirano-senpai’s voice was as matter-of-fact as the sky above their heads. And just as starkly blue. “I can’t – I won’t continue. So I’m going to stop.”

 

A medical degree was six years. Hirano-senpai had had to repeat a year. He was now twenty-four. Would have graduated at twenty-five.

 

“I’m done,” Hirano-senpai said. “It’s kind of sad. But it’s good, right?”

 

The man’s voice was like the bed of a shallow river. All sharp stones and sucking sand. The stones, the sand – that was the fear, sunk deep.

 

Shuzo thought of his mother.

 

For the first time in two months, he left himself think of his mother. The lack of expression on her face, in their afternoon-bright, spacious kitchen, with the wind outside banging against the windows – when he told her that she’d won.

 

After he’d helped Hirano-senpai move the rest of the books out onto the landing, line them up by the low wall – Hirano-senpai said that a friend would come and help him with the rest later – Shuzo went inside his apartment. Shut the door, and leaned against it, letting his eyes adjust to the dim, closed space.

 

His phone came alive. He ignored Tatsuya’s messages, five of them, the tone of them vacillating between worried and irritated.

 

Sei had sent a message.

 

Shuzo, the message said. I am in Tokyo this afternoon. If it is not inconvenient, I would like to –  

 

 

_And you realized. This grind. It won’t stop. Even with victory gone, the inevitability is still there. The expectations, generated by your parents, but are now just as much generated by you, yourself. Your worth is built on winning._

_Just losing. Once or a hundred times. It doesn’t take that truth away._

_You understand, don’t you, Akashi Seijuro? Everything that I have said. And so you should know, I blame you for my death._

_I blame myself too. The empty shells of people that you and I have both become. We take ownership for them. I am not a toy; I was not broken._

_That doesn’t mean I like myself enough to want to live._

_(On the fold of the letter)_

_To: Akashi Seijuro_

_From: Iwakura Yukari_

“We could have met at a restaurant,” Shuzo said, as he gestured his boyfriend inside his apartment. The windows cast a disjointed, elongated square of light across the bed, the floor, the desk and the wall in front of it. Dust motes hovered in the bright space above Shuzo’s dark blue sheets, the tatami mats, the unlit desk lamp. “This isn’t a great neighbourhood for Takayama-san’s car to be idling around in.”

 

Sei was dressed, for some reason, in a formal suit. Pressed shirt and blazer, dark tie loosened at the neck. An expensive but tasteful watch gleamed on his wrist. His polished leather shoes looked out of place on the faded tatami mats. 

 

Shuzo had last heard his voice a week ago. Seen him in person over the spring break. Sei had been practicing for the first of his matches in the 3-dan league. Shuzo had sprawled on his back on his boyfriend’s bed in the Akashi main house, counted the stars some fun-loving person – probably Sei’s mother, knowing what Shuzo did of the family – had glued to the ceiling above the bed. All the main constellations; a few non-existent ones. Eventually, Shuzo had fallen asleep counting them, reciting their names in his head, making up the names of the non-existent ones, and at the same time listening with half an ear to the quiet click of shogi pieces a few paces away. Sei’s presence, quiet and unobtrusive at the low table by the double set of floor-length windows.

 

Sei said, almost two months later, crimson-gold gaze flicking sideways to meet Shuzo’s eyes, “I preferred a private space for our meeting, Shuzo. Takayama-san will not have to wait long.”

 

Shuzo leaned back against the wall by the closed door. Suppressed the urge to step forward instead, draw Sei into a kiss, run his fingers through that familiar, fire-soft hair, feel warm breath mingling with his. Sei had come here for a reason. “Are you okay?” he said. Kept his tone practical rather than cautious or solicitous. “It’s three and a half hours by train from Kyoto to here – did your dad need you for something –”

 

Sei in his space was a quick, decisive motion. His mouth on Shuzo’s, firm, insistent. The taste of tofu soup, bitter tea, and something sweet-sharp that was unnameable but deeply ingrained in Shuzo’s every sense. Their bodies pressed together. Sei’s left hand was gentle on Shuzo’s face, fingers stroking from his cheek to the curve of his ear; his right curled into a fist on the wall behind.

 

The decision in it. The cold, single-minded focus. The edge between method and intensity. Shuzo broke the kiss. “I’m not –” Fucking stress relief. That sounded neglected. He scowled. “Tell me what the hell is going on with you.”

 

Sei’s eyes were shaded in the dimly-lit room. His face was a mask of control. He said, “My father wishes to see me before I leave. I have limited time, Shuzo.” A breath. A pause in time. A shout, the voice of the ramen shop owner, threaded up in the afternoon-warm air, slipped through Shuzo’s window. Clipped, “Please.”

 

The space between them was less than a hand span’s worth. Sei’s fingers still rested, light, on the side of Shuzo’s face.

 

Shuzo shut his eyes. Briefly. Then opened them again. The room was dim, the light was choked with dust, and Sei’s expression was like a smooth metal sheet. “Fine.”

 

Their shoes kicked off on the wooden floor. Socks slipped a little on the tatami mats. Sei’s tie came fully undone in Shuzo’s fingers. The window closed. Iron rings clicked on the curtain rail. The afternoon, cut off, pasted itself against the light green material of the curtains, cast its dimmed glow on Sei’s hair, the bare skin on the back of his neck. He leaned down, kissed Shuzo on the mouth. Deliberate, slow.

 

Shuzo bit down on his tongue a little. This was supposed to be quick.  

 

Sei’s hand braced against the pillow by Shuzo’s head. His other hand reached between them, grasping for the zipper on Shuzo’s pants.

 

Shuzo caught that hand. Flipped their positions. The pillow dipped beneath Sei’s head, marked a stark contrast with his crimson hair. The sheet crinkled.

 

Their breathing was harsh in the quiet air.

 

Sei’s shirt slipped easily from his pants. The belt buckle, only a bit more difficult to undo. Shuzo put his hand inside. Watched his boyfriend’s face still, his eyes dilate.

 

“You need to be quick,” he heard himself say. Quiet. Their limbs pressed together, fitted, flesh and fabric, smooth warmth and crinkled folds. “Let me jerk you off.”

 

A layer of clarity slotted into Sei’s gaze. Darkened it. “Shuzo –”

 

The solid silence. Tatsuya’s voice over Skype, Sei’s over the phone, Sachi’s and Kou’s contained within their brief emails – even short conversation with Hirano-san on the landing outside both their apartments – nothing worked to break it. Shards of it lingered in the corners of the room, in the cracks in the floor – when Shuzo took a breath from work, from speaking, from listening to music on his headphones or eating curry rice he had cooked himself in the tiny kitchen, those shards reformed. Crystallised.

 

A year had passed since they begun having sex. Shuzo knew his boyfriend’s body intimately. He stroked his fingers. Dropped his head to Sei’s neck, at the same time, and kissed the skin there. He didn’t mark it. It was Monday tomorrow.

 

Breath stuttered in his ear. A deep inhale, let out shallow and punctuated.

 

When Sei came, it was quiet, as always. Shuzo watched his face. When Sei’s expression tensed, he leaned down, fit their mouths together. His wrist twisted. The singular sound that Sei made – swallowed into silence.

 

They rested for a moment, lying next to each other. Shuzo drew his hand from Sei’s trousers, resisted the urge to wipe it on the sheets. He rolled onto his back, let the hand hang off the bed. Closed his eyes. He was painfully hard. “You want to tell me why you’re here?”

 

Sei’s breathing regulated. He recovered quickly; in the beginning, it had somewhat irritated Shuzo. Now, it just amused him.

 

His boyfriend leaned over, closed teeth on the junction between Shuzo’s neck and shoulder.

 

“You don’t have to,” Shuzo began. Despite himself, he could hear the edge in his voice. Swore in his head, at the same time that his mind recoiled from itself. Surprise, unease. There was no reason to not want Sei to –

 

But the bite of pain as Sei nibbled a mark into skin, reached a hand between them to grip Shuzo where his hard-on strained through his jeans – it quickly overrode misgivings.

 

“Iwakura Yukari-san of the disciplinary committee,” Sei said, low. The words vibrated against Shuzo’s neck. He couldn’t really think to absorb their meaning, much less that Sei had said another person’s name when they were having sex. “Committed suicide on Monday morning.”

 

Shuzo hadn’t had sex for two months. He came embarrassingly quickly. The sound muffled in the sheets.

 

Light filtered back in. Reason. The sweep of cars outside. The slam of a door further down the landing. The meaning of what Sei had just said.

 

He jerked away from his boyfriend. Misjudged the distance between his body and the edge of the bed. His skull cracked on the floor. The mats softened the blow only a little. He put a hand to his head. Thank fuck, it wasn’t the sticky one. He should have just wiped it on the sheets – shit.

 

Sei was at his side almost immediately. A shadow on the tatami mats. The electric fan overhead spun shadows across the wall. “Shuzo –”

 

“Why would you tell me that,” Shuzo said, as evenly as he could, “while we were having sex.” He couldn’t make it a question. “Of all the fucked-up –”

 

“Your head, Shuzo,” Sei said. Controlled.

 

“It bloody hurts,” Shuzo snapped. His own attempts at control had dissipated quickly. “But I’m fine. No dizziness. Perfectly clear-headed.”

 

The weave of the tatami mats dug into the bare skin of his arm, the side of his face. It registered through the thin fabric of his shirt.

 

Sei gripped his shoulder. Started to speak.

 

“I _don’t_ have a concussion.”

 

The space between them yawned. The sun outside had dimmed. No longer pasted itself to the curtains.

 

Sei’s hair looked darker now that the sun was gone, a dull red in the longer, deeper shadows of the room. 

 

Sei sat back. Shuzo pushed himself up, pressed his back against the metal frame of the single bed.

 

“I apologize,” Sei said, finally. “It was a poor decision.”

 

Iwakura Yukari-san. Shuzo knew the name. Half-familiar, not a personal acquaintance. Someone he knew through – Sei. Iwakura Yukari was the name of the vice-president of the shogi club at Rakuzan.

 

His boyfriend said, “Iwakura-san wrote a letter before she died. A suicide note. She addressed it to me.”

 

The pain in Shuzo’s head was beginning to fade. He was no more inclined to move from his position against the bed. The new anger, though, was sharp, pre-emptive. Overshadowed the dark temper still directed at Sei. “What, did she blame you –”

 

Dispassionate. “She did. Me as well as herself. But that is not the – important thing.”

 

“That she offed herself,” Shuzo said, more crudely than he should have. Too harsh, for a dead girl. A dead girl Sei had known, and who was a year younger than Shuzo himself. “Has nothing to do with you.”

 

Sei’s shirt was open at the neck. The first two buttons were undone. His tie had been discarded somewhere near the door. His hair was mussed; his trousers were open in the front. Shuzo’s clothes were in a similar state.

 

It was a ridiculous situation, to be having this kind of conversation in.

 

Sei sat cross-legged. His hands rested loosely in his lap.

 

Shuzo pressed the heel of his fist into his eyes. The pain in his head was gone; but the frustration was not. The solid, solid frustration. Suffocating. Reason, creeping inside his chest along with sunlight and quiet, told him that it was not just frustration; it was also something else. Shuzo knew what it was.

 

He ignored reason.

 

Sei said into the space between them, “I am aware of that.” His gaze shifted, away, toward the darkness by the closed door. “Nonetheless, some of her statements demonstrated – a certain precise insight.”

 

“Precise insight.”

 

Another door banged. A voice Shuzo recognized as Hirano-senpai’s shouted something. _I don’t know –_ And then the volume yanked down.

 

Shuzo said, “What did she write, Sei?”

 

Sei’s mouth was a line. His eyes were dark.

 

Shuzo was tired. He had left his phone on the desk before opening the door for his boyfriend. He saw it vibrate now, the screen lighting up, electric glare stark and out-of-place in the naturally dim room. It could be a classmate. It was most likely Tatsuya. It was six o’clock Monday in Los Angeles. Two o’clock here in Japan.

 

Shuzo didn’t know if he did the right thing, or the easy thing, when he said, “You don’t have to tell me everything. You can look after yourself. You know that, and I know that. Thank you, for telling me at all.”

 

The tension bled a little, from Sei’s face.

 

“Whatever she said – when you’ve figured out what you think about it, Sei, – even before that, if you need to talk – you know that I love you.” It was the one certain thing he had said this afternoon. Made the knot in his chest loosen a little, the room seem larger. “I’m sorry, about Iwakura-san.”

 

Sei took a breath. It was shallow, in the shadowed space.

 

 

 

Afterwards, as Shuzo saw him to the staircase, Sei turned back. Studied him. They had both neatened up their clothes. Sei more successfully than Shuzo.

 

An expensive car was idling at the sidewalk, next to a large blue dumpster. It stuck out like a cat amongst pigeons in the street in front of Shuzo’s apartment building. Two of the employees at the pizza outlet, a teenage girl and an older man, glanced at the car and then each other. The girl shrugged, said something Shuzo couldn’t hear, before moving to her delivery scooter. It kicked to life. She waved at the the older man, who went back inside.  

 

Shuzo could see Takayama-san sitting in the driver’s seat. He lifted a hand in the old man’s direction. Takayama-san bowed a little, politely.

 

Sei said, “You were troubled earlier.”

 

Shuzo stiffened before he could stop himself. Shit. “You noticed.”

 

A line of iron. “I noticed, Shuzo.”

 

The solidity was back. More than frustration, more than loneliness; Shuzo knew what it was. He had felt it before, when his father died. Immutable, sharp-edged. Like a rock jutting out in open sea. A storm coming.

 

The sky was a softer blue than it had been an hour ago. Sei’s leather shoes waited at the edge of the top step on the cement staircase. The step was cracked.

 

They had both learned better. Shuzo said, “My mother –”

 

It was a different thing than Shuzo thought it was. His thoughts – his feelings – were unreasonable; this he knew without a doubt. Even if she refused to see him, made it clear that he was not welcome in her house – she was still there. A twenty-minute bus ride away. In the same city. In the same timezone, the same expanse of physical, geographical space.

 

Shuzo could pick up the phone. He could call her.

 

She wouldn’t answer.

 

When Shuzo had set up a standing order at the bank for his bills to be paid direct from his account – the account had been in his name. The money was his father’s money.

 

The panic was almost a year delayed. It was irrational. It was stupid.

 

It was like being orphaned all over again.

 

Shuzo couldn’t say that. Not here, not now. He looked away. “Maybe another time.”

 

Sei’s posture was always straight. There was no discernible change in the way he held himself, when he replied. Only his tone shifted, became gated. “Of course. Forgive my presumption. I had forgotten that this was our usual pattern.”

 

The sarcasm – that had been learned from Mayuzumi. Definitely. Shuzo couldn’t stop the answering edge in his own voice. “We’ve both gotten better at this.”

 

“Perhaps,” Sei said. “If you will excuse me.”

 

If they left things like this, with Sei leaving for Kyoto, three hours and a half away by Shinkansen – “It’s not something that’s easy to say.”

 

Another delivery scooter kicked to life. Rumbled slowly down the street. At roughly two on a Sunday, the traffic was sparse. Shuzo heard the sound clearly. Cutting through the warm air.

 

Sei said, dangerously, “And what I had to say was uncomplicated.”

 

Shuzo bit out, “You told me while bloody jerking me off. I don’t think you get to take the high ground.”

 

A latch dropped. The front door of the flat by the landing – Hirano-senpai’s flat – opened. Hirano-senpai’s hand twitched on the inside knob. His face was deliberately blank. “Uh.”

 

Sei let out a breath. The fury contained within the simple movement of air, probably as much redirected from Shuzo as generated by Hirano-senpai himself – was the kind that made people piss themselves.

 

Shuzo was blunt. “What the fuck are you doing, senpai?”

 

Hirano-senpai held up his hands. “The doors here aren’t exactly thick. You should know to keep your voice down, Nijimura. But, really, I wasn’t interested in eavesdropping. I was just leaving.” His fingers tensed. Curled in a little. “A friend of mine left something here. I need to return it to her.”

 

“Hirano Keishi-san,” Sei said. Polite. Freezing. “Shuzo’s senpai from Waseda University.”

 

Shuzo had forgotten that he’d told Sei about him. The medical student senpai who lived next door to him.

 

“Former senpai,” Hirano-senpai corrected. A bit sharply. And then he flinched. The natural instinct that most people had when it came to Akashi Seijuro – the instinct to submit or to run away – kicking into gear.

 

Sei didn’t look away from him. Cloud-shadow passed over them.

 

Hirano-senpai opened his mouth. Closed it.

 

Shuzo’s irritation at his boyfriend hadn’t gone. Heightened by the lingering anxiety of his new awareness about himself – how he felt about Kaa-san’s disinheritance of him. “Sei,” he said. Flat. “Your meeting with your father. You’re going to be late.”

 

Sei lifted his head. A simple movement. The tension left his shoulders. Perfect composure. His tone, when he spoke, was fluid. Easy as a summer-warm river flowing past. “You are correct, Shuzo. Thank you for reminding me.”

 

There were rocks waiting around the bend. Three layers of rocks. A sharp bend. A strong, white current.

 

Shuzo bit his tongue.

 

Sei’s footsteps faded down the staircase. A car door opened. Shut. A metallic thud. Takayama-san started the engine.

 

Shuzo hunched his shoulders briefly. Let out a breath. His head hurt with exhaustion.

 

Hirano-senpai stepped out from his apartment. The door closed behind him. Shadows shifted across the landing. The sun had come out. “Who in hell was that?”

 

The hand kneading the bridge of his nose wasn’t doing much good. Shuzo turned from his senpai. “I’m going to bed.”

 

 

 

Iwakura Yukari had been a respectable shogi opponent. Seijuro had spent many long evenings playing opposite her, after her disciplinary committee and his basketball club activities had concluded. It was not a significant friendship; they were both reserved people, rather than emotional or invested, and so they did not spend their games conversing on important matters of the heart.

 

Nonetheless, they had conversed enough, in the electric-lit, quiet space of the shogi clubroom, with its many desks arranged in three rows from one side of the classroom to the other, for Seijuro to be aware of certain facts about Iwakura-san’s life.

 

These facts included: that she collected light novels and manga; and that she had an ironic, almost cruel sense of humour.

 

Three weeks after Iwakura-san’s funeral, and Seijuro’s quarrel with Shuzo – which as of now had only been slightly remedied over a series of stilted phone calls – Seijuro arrived back at his dormitory room to find Chihiro sitting in front of it.

 

His former teammate’s face was blank with a suppressed fury. He wasn’t reading, as he would usually have been if he were waiting for someone to arrive. The backpack on his lap was zipped closed. His fingers, holding onto the straps, were white-knuckled.

 

“Chihiro,” Seijuro said. Kept his tone even. “This is a surprise.”

 

“Did you know?” Chihiro said. Low, vibrating.

 

Iwakura-san, Seijuro had commented to her once, during a shogi camp in the summer of their second year, shared many features with Chihiro. Their common love for light novels and manga. Their pale hair, dark eyes. Iwakura-san was politer, more traditionally accomplished. But the similarities were there.

 

“Did you know, Akashi? That your dead friend was going to will me her –” An impotent pause. Chihiro’s bag dropped onto the floor, its owner having gotten to his feet. A door opened further up the landing.

 

One of the basketball scholarship holders, a second-year, paused. “Akashi-buchou. Mayuzumi-senpai.”

 

Chihiro tensed.

 

Seijuro adjusted the strap of his sports bag on his shoulder. Nodded in the second-year’s direction. “Toshiyuki. You did well at practice today.” To Chihiro, with deliberate intent. “If you would like to continue this discussion in my room –”

 

“Fuck –” Chihiro began.

 

Seijuro did not speak.

 

Chihiro cut off mid-sentence. Gaze narrowed. And then he looked away. “Fine. We can go somewhere else. But not your room. Outside. I need to –” An abortive head gesture, much like shaking off water. And then he picked up his backpack, preceded Seijuro down the staircase.

 

Without direction or agreement, they went to Sports Hall A, the one normally used by Rakuzan’s first-string basketball line-up. Seijuro unlocked the doors, let the both of them inside the vast, dark space. Lights flicked on, in a sweep from the left side of the hall to the right. The accompanying noise was sharp, metallic. Seijuro blinked a little.

 

Chihiro’s tone was subdued. “Haven’t been back here for months.”

 

“After the Inter-High,” Seijuro said, “I will also no longer have a reason to return here.”

 

A snort. “Even the great Akashi Seijuro has to stop club activities to study. What, aiming for Todai? You’re planning to take over the world, I suppose.”

 

Seijuro’s most recent conversation with his father on this matter had not been a pleasant one. He folded his arms, chose not to reply.

 

Chihiro’s sneakers squeaked on the polished floor. He walked a distance from Seijuro, along the half-court line. Stopped directly beneath a silently glowing lamp. “Iwakura Yukari. Dead. Why the fuck did she give me her stuff?”

 

“Iwakura-san’s brother does not share her interest in light fiction,” Seijuro said.

 

“I didn’t even know she was dead.”

 

“The school saw fit to keep the matter quiet. Even from alumni.”

 

“How are you so bloody _calm_ about –” Chihiro turned, stopped at whatever he saw on Seijuro’s face. And then he smiled. Ironic, almost cruel. Like Iwakura-san. “You’re not. Are you? You got close with Iwakura last year. You liked her. Someone just like you.”

 

 _And you realized_ , Iwakura-san had written. _This grind. It won’t stop. Even with victory gone, the inevitability is still there. The expectations, generated by your parents, but are now just as much generated by you, yourself. Your worth is built on winning._

_Just losing. Once or a hundred times. It doesn’t take that truth away._

_You understand, don’t you, Akashi Seijuro? Everything that I have said. And so you should know, I blame you for my death._

Seijuro was in control of his emotions. His hair was still wet from his shower in the club locker room. This was why he lifted his head. The damp was soaking into his collar. It was unclear to him, however, why he felt the need to inform Chihiro: “Iwakura-san left me a letter.”

 

“She left you a –” The humour was gone from Chihiro’s tone. “What did it say?”

 

Shuzo had asked the same question. Seijuro had not wanted to answer. Shuzo had recognised, and then allowed, the evasion.

 

The year before, Seijuro’s fear of losing Shuzo, just as he had lost him once before, at Teiko, along with Tetsuya, Shintaro, and the others – just as his parents had lost one another, and Father had lost Yuuto-oji-san – had led him to first force an impasse between them, and then to attempt to go in the opposite direction: demarcate clear boundaries in their relationship. The aim had been to manufacture a way in which Shuzo would stay, either because they understood each other completely, or because they did not attempt to understand those things about each other which were too private or too intimate to share.

 

Iwakura-san had written: _And then there were your friends. You lost your friends. Because either they were as brilliant as you were, and realized, just like you, the futility of that brilliance. The suffocating_ frustration _of it_. _Or they were weaker, and they envied you, and gave way to you, and left._

The Generation of Miracles fit the first criteria. Countless now-faceless, now-nameless people – from Seijuro’s childhood, from his current everyday life – fit the second. Shuzo, Chihiro, Tetsuya, Ryota, the others from Rakuzan who kept in sporadic Reo-coordinated communication with Seijuro – they fit neither description.

 

Iwakura-san’s final words. She had said some things that carried a ring of truth, some things that did not. Seijuro’s repeated analysis of her letter these past few weeks, out of curiosity rather than necessity – it yielded no answers.

 

Seijuro was not responsible for her death.

 

His experiences were not hers.

 

She had said that she and Seijuro were alike. She had said that Seijuro would understand.

 

_You understand, don’t you, Akashi Seijuro? Everything that I have said. And so you should know, I blame you for my death._

 

_I blame myself too. The empty shells of people that you and I have both become. We take ownership for them. I am not a toy; I was not broken._

_That doesn’t mean I like myself enough to want to live._

Footsteps entered into Seijuro’s space. Chihiro’s voice was wary. His hand descended close to Seijuro’s shoulder, then dropped. “You don’t believe her – what did Iwakura say, Akashi? What was in the fucking letter?”

 

What Seijuro had been unable to say to Shuzo, what Shuzo had been unable to say to him – perhaps their inability to confide in one another was born of a simple, fundamental distrust. They had both abandoned, and been abandoned. The same as Iwakura-san.

 

The evening before she had died, they had played a game together in the shogi clubroom. Summer was creeping in; the sun was lingering for longer and longer in the sky outside the windows. Wind swept inside, a bit strong, toppled Iwakura-san’s almost-empty plastic water bottle from the table onto the ground. The floor by the table leg was cracked. The bottle caught in the crack, refused to roll further.

 

Iwakura-san had not picked the bottle up. She had stared at it instead, for a long moment.

 

Seijuro said her name, politely.

 

She smiled at him. Her pale hair slipped over her shoulder as she bent down, caught the bottle with her fingers. “Akashi-kun,” she said. “What do you think sums up an individual? Defines them.”

 

They had decided to play without a timer. A relaxing game before Iwakura-san’s chemistry test the next morning.

 

Seijuro considered the question. It was oddly existential for Iwakura-san, normally eminently practical but for her interest in fantastical novels and shonen manga. “Their accomplishments, I would assume.” And then, inviting a discussion, “What is your opinion, Iwakura-san?”

 

She shook her head. The bottle settled on the wooden table. A piece disappeared into the palm of her hand. One of Seijuro’s knights. “Maybe later.” She smiled. “Your move, Akashi-kun.”

 

The crux of the problems between Shuzo and himself. That which had prevented Iwakura-san from confiding her worries to Seijuro at a crucial time in her life. A fundamental, continuing distrust.

 

Weeks later, in the electric-lit expanse of a hall Chihiro had long left behind, Seijuro did not voice this newly-gained awarenss of himself to his former teammate. He said, instead, “Accomplishments define an individual, Chihiro.”

 

They had not closed the door behind them properly. It swung a little. A strong wind. The sound was slow, metallic.

 

Chihiro’s face shifted. Shadowed. “I didn’t come here to listen to you talk your absolute crimson emperor shit. I’ve graduated, you know. I’m not your fucking subordinate anymore –”

 

“Do you believe that the statement is valid?”

 

A lift of Chihiro’s head. The light caught the paleness of his hair. Just a shade lighter than Iwakura-san’s. They were not identical. Surprise made his tone thin, suspicious. “Are you asking? You’re asking me. I thought Akashi Seijuro didn’t ask questions. You know everything. Or you demand it.”

 

Seijuro had little idea from where Chihiro derived this impression. Seijuro did not demand; he made his expectations clear, and expected obedience except in justifiable extraordinary circumstances.

 

The door vibrated on its hinges. Clanged once, twice. Shadows shifted across the floor. The row of windows along the uppermost edge of the walls were darkening. Evening, settling into the Rakuzan campus.

 

Chihiro scowled. “It doesn’t matter what I believe. Does it? I’m just the stage prop here. So you can talk to yourself.”

 

Chihiro had never stopped being bitter about his initial role in Seijuro’s life. Tetsuya’s replacement. Over the past two years, however, since the events created by Yamada Isamu’s arrogance, which had culminated in Yamada’s sudden and unexplained withdrawal from the basketball club in Seijuro’s second year – Chihiro had mellowed. Perhaps he had given up. On expecting different from Seijuro. And in that same resignation, he had followed the same path as that taken by Reo, Eikichi, Kotaro, Tetsuya, Ryota, Shintaro, Shuzo. Accepting Seijuro as Seijuro was now.

 

Iwakura-san had written: _I am not a toy; I was not broken._

_That doesn’t mean I like myself enough to want to live._

 

Seijuro was not suicidal. He had never even contemplated the idea. The indubitable cowardice of it.

 

The windows along the walls of the sports hall were completely dark. The only light was that of the electric overhead lamps lining the ceiling. The lines of the basketball court, inked in a deep black, stretched out before Seijuro, Chihiro. A box. A curve. A corner and an edge.

 

Seijuro composed himself. Turned from Chihiro and went to the board by the door. The light switches waited in a silent row. “Thank you for your time, Chihiro. We should leave, however, before the teachers conduct their rounds of the facilities.”

 

Shoes were louder in the night-confined space of the hall. Chihiro opened his mouth to say something, face twisting slightly, and then he cut himself off. Brushed past Seijuro to exit the hall. The door hung half-open. Darkness waited outside.

 

The switches depressed, one by one, beneath Seijuro’s hand.

 

The sound of the lights switching off – sudden, metallic. Like teeth clamping down. A trap shutting.

 

 

 

In a moment of free time in the library – a break before his brain exploded from reading political theory – Shuzo found himself looking up, in Google Search: disowned children parent grieving.

 

It was the practical thing to do. Recognise the situation. Own it. Deal with it.

 

He had Skyped Tatsuya possibly only once over the past three weeks. Begged off the other times. In that single Skype call, just a few days ago, his friend had looked exhausted. Pale, shadows under his eyes. As usual these days. And he had said, “Shuu –”

 

“I’m dealing with it,” Shuzo had said, before he could finish the sentence. “Can we talk about something else.”

 

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Tatsuya snapped. “I left you alone after your dad died. And what did you do? You collapsed in school from exhaustion –”

 

“That was years ago. I’m managing my workload this time. And everything else. It’s not the same. You look worse –”

 

“This isn’t something you can ignore –”

 

“And, what, you’re not ignoring it –”

 

Dangerous, “What am I ignoring, Shuu?”

 

Shuzo had not intended a fight. He bit his tongue. He was doing it a lot these past three weeks. An increasing irritability that he was hard pressed not to let out during group study sessions or basketball practice. His rational mind partly blamed it on Sei, whose coming had occasioned one of their usual passive-aggressive fights, a fight that still had yet to be properly resolved. A deeper part of that rational mind also partly blamed it on his brand-new, brittle recognition of his feelings about his mother. “Nothing,” he said to Tatsuya. Tone curt.

 

“If this is about basketball –” Tatsuya began.

 

It always came back to basketball, with Shuzo’s best friend. He controlled his expression. The tone of his voice. “Can we talk about something else? Tatsuya.”

 

It was probably the exhaustion. The fact that Tatsuya had most likely spent the past few weeks doing constant battle with real and imagined inferiority, doubled or tripled personal training, slipping studies – there was a match coming up, Shuzo knew, and the starting line-up had yet to be announced.

 

His friend’s gaze dropped. To a keyboard Shuzo couldn’t see. Not from this angle. And then he turned his head. It wasn’t Skype that made the movement slower than it should be. “Fine. Something else.”

 

A few days later, Shuzo studied the computer screen in front of him. He wasn’t in his room, but in Waseda’s FPSE student library. Other students were scattered at desks around him. Shelves of books gleamed quietly beneath electric lights. The laptop screen didn’t speak to him. If Shuzo needed to – if he wanted to – he could minimise the windows he had opened without reading them. He could exit, and not look at them again.

 

He didn’t do either. Scrolled down the pages instead, scanning the information there.

 

After about fifteen minutes of this, he closed all of the windows. Tapped his fingers on the portable mouse. And then shut the lid of his laptop, pulled the plug from the wall. He packed his books quietly. Took his jacket from the back of his chair, and left the building. The glass doors slid open. Sunlight shone into his eyes. He shaded them.

 

“Hey,” a familiar voice said. “Nijimura!”

 

Shuzo put his hand down. Turned. Damn.

 

Hayama grinned at him, teeth sharp. “Haven’t seen you around since graduation.”

 

“Not my problem,” Shuzo said bluntly. “You don’t go here.”

 

“I’m surprised you remembered, vice-captain.”

 

A gaggle of girls passed by. One of them cast a lingering glance in Hayama’s direction. Hayama grinned at her. Slung his headphones around his neck, and waved. She smiled, tugged on the end of her long dark ponytail in a way she probably thought was cute. Shuzo had caught his younger sister doing it once, in her bedroom when they were still in America. They had a silent agreement never to talk about it.

 

“You have prettier girls here than we do at TUFS,” he said. “What’s the point in studying new languages if I can’t use them to pick up girls?”

 

“You can’t pick up girls, anyway, moron,” Shuzo said. “You’re dating Izuki. From Seirin.”

 

“Todai now, actually,” Hayama said. He was still smiling, but there was a darker edge to the expression. His hands went inside the pockets of his shorts. The wire running between his headphones and some device in one of those pockets tightened. “He’s a mathematics major. Say, Nijimura, did you know –”

 

The doors behind Shuzo slid open. Someone emerged. He took an automatic step away from the front of the building. Stopped by an unlit lamp post. The weather had become colder over the past few days. He should have worn his jacket instead of throwing it over his arm. The wind cut easily through the fabric of his faded T-shirt.

 

“Shun’s parents disowned him. For dating me.”

 

The wire tugged free of Hayama’s headphones. Dangled almost to the ground. Either it hadn’t been inserted properly, or Hayama had exerted too much pressure on his i-Phone or whatever it was.  

 

Sound struggled into the spring-crisp air. It wasn't music, which was what Shuzo might have expected. Hayama’s jogging get-up. But it wasn’t music; it was some kind of language program. Korean. Maybe something else. Shuzo couldn’t really tell.

 

The only thing he knew about Seirin’s Izuki Shun, outside of basketball, was that the guy liked puns.

 

“I was thinking,” Hayama said. The tone was almost careless. Hayama wasn’t even looking at him, but at something just behind him. Maybe the retreating back of the pretty dark-haired, dark-eyed girl who had smiled at him. Maybe at the spring-laden trees lining the path in front of the library. He and Shuzo were not alone. The space around them wasn’t empty, or private. The sun, even cold, was unforgiving. “Maybe you could talk to him.”

 

 

 

Shuzo had been in this park before, with his family before Tou-san got sick. It had been the family’s favourite place to go in summer. Kou liked it because of its shape, a double loop squashed on one side so that it looked more like a pair of old spectacles. Sachi liked it because of the small wooden pavilion at the place where the double loop connected - the bridge of the spectacles – by a large, quiet lake. She had enjoyed making Kou and Shuzo play at imaginary castles and sieges with her, with the enemy coming from both sides of the gently sloping hill.

 

Kaa-san and Tou-san had just liked the fact that while the kids played, they could get cold popsicles from the nice oji-san at the east entrance, and sit on the edge of the path with their feet in the water, talking about grown-up, boring things.

 

It all seemed a long time ago.

 

Almost five years since the last time the family had come here, together, Shuzo found himself, again, in the park. He dropped his backpack on the bench inside the pavilion, unzipped his jacket against the heat, and put on his earphones. The stone wall just behind the bench was cool against his back.

 

“Nijimura,” said a polite voice. And then a note of humour. “I haven’t been here before. My family usually yo-yoed between Yoyogi Park and –”

 

“Shut up,” Shuzo said, automatically. Pulled his earphones from his ears. “Izuki.”

 

Izuki Shun, in a grey Todai hoodie, dark eyes unusually neutral, stood in front of him. The half-smile on his face froze, closed. The sun shone down on his head, cast his shadow across the cement floor of the pavilion. “Kotaro-kun shouldn’t have asked you,” he said.

 

“You came,” Shuzo pointed out. “Sit down.”

 

A sling bag slid over the wooden bench perpendicular to Shuzo’s. Izuki’s blue-and-white sneakers tapped once, twice, on the cement floor, then remained still.

 

Shuzo didn’t know why he had agreed to this. He had just heard the carelessness in Hayama’s irritating voice, seen the way his former teammate couldn’t meet his gaze straight-on, and he had heard himelf say the words before the action could register in his head.

 

His mind was blank. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck. He felt tired, despite having slept maybe ten hours the night before. Like the dead. Hirano-senpai had been annoyed when repeated banging on Shuzo’s door in the morning had failed to get him up for a parcel delivery. From Kaa-san. Some stuff he’d forgotten at the house. Why it had taken her nearly three months to send it to him –

 

What the fuck was there to say to Izuki? He didn’t have it figured out any more than Hayama’s boyfriend did. The rational thing to do in this situation, the rational way to feel – It was probably best to just move on. They both still had friends, people important to them and whom they were important to. They both still had lives.

 

 _Allow yourself to feel emotions_ , one of the websites had said. _Betrayal, abandonment, sadness, and anger_ … _you need to take time to let these feelings out._

Shuzo was aware of the heat, made humid by the close proximity of the lake. He was aware of the snug grip of his basketball shoes on his feet, the smooth shift of his jacket collar against his neck when he hunched his shoulders briefly.

 

Emotions were words. 

_Don't dwell on what you could have done or said differently. Many times, there is nothing you could have done to make your parents love you._

 

“Nijimura,” Izuki said.

 

He was supposed to be talking to Izuki. Not panicking silently to himself like this. Why was he choosing now, of all times, to panic? In front of someone whose face he had rarely seen outside of practice matches and official basketball tournaments.

 

On his way in from the train station, Shuzo had passed the popsicle-selling oji-san. The man had gotten old over the past five years. Tanned face more wrinkled, shoulders smaller and voice gruffer than Shuzo remembered.

 

_Children who have been disowned by their parents often feel empty and think –_

Izuki’s voice was closer this time. He was saying Shuzo’s family name again.

 

Shit. Fuck. Shit. Shuzo’s brain was tired. But every nerve was alive. Blanking.

 

 _That they are incapable of being loved_.

 

The website article had suggested steps to coping with being disowned. Shuzo knew this with the same remote clarity with which he knew that he was probably scaring the fuck out of Izuki right now.

 

He needed to breathe. Count to ten. This was an anxiety attack. He’d had them before, in the months immediately after his father died – after Shuzo decided his father should die; he cut off that thought brutally and without mercy. He was _done_ thinking like that.

 

Rationality. Calm. He was in a pavilion in a park by the train station.

 

He shut his eyes. Ignored the pain of his fingernails digging too hard into the skin of his palms. It was grounding.

 

“Should I call someone?” Izuki was saying. Tone controlled. When Shuzo opened his eyes again, the former Seirin player was crouched in front of him, gaze the quality of compressed air.

 

Tatsuya was in America. Sei was in Kyoto.

 

Shuzo said, ignoring the way his voice cracked a little at the end of the first syllable, “No one to call.” A steadying breath. “Would you mind getting some water?”

 

“Water.”

 

“The vending machine’s just a few minutes down the path.”

 

“Right, I’ll go.” Izuki stood up. Paused. His hands curled at his sides, a half-motion before they deliberately loosened. “There’s no one you want to call.”

 

It had been a long time since Shuzo had thought of calling his mother. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

 

Izuki’s footsteps retreated back the way he had come.

 

Shuzo forced his own fists to unlock. Took another breath. The air pressed down. In a sudden decision, he shrugged off his jacket. The heat was unbearable; he felt restricted, too warm. The article of clothing hit the bench, accompanied by a metallic clank – Shuzo’s keys, some loose one-hundred and five-hundred coins. His phone.

 

Fabric shifted beneath Shuzo’s fingers. Flat metal casing slipped neatly into his hand. He drew the phone out, looked at it in the glare of the sun, softened only a little by the deep eaves of the pavilion. Dust motes hovered above the screen. A trail of ordinarily invisible particles of matter.

 

It was four in the morning in Los Angeles. At Rakuzan, the lunch bell had probably just gone. Shuzo’s limbs froze, for a moment. And then he made himself press speed dial. 

 

A liquid metal voice answered. “Shuzo. A call from you at this time of day is a rare occurrence.” The statement was knife-edged, as had been most of their exchanges since their fight a month ago. But the edge was more blunted than the last time they had spoken. Seijuro’s temper, mellowed by something that had happened in between that recent conversation and this phone call.

 

“Are you –” Shuzo had thought his voice was fine. He controlled it. Spoke again. “Is this a bad time?”

 

A moment’s pause. And then, simply, “No, it is not.”

 

There wasn’t a point in hedging. “It’s a lot to ask, Sei. Could you come down to Tokyo sometime next week?”

 

Gravel crunched on the path. Izuki’s shadow outlined itself on the floor of the pavilion. He had a water bottle in his left hand. Juice in his right. He was watching Shuzo with an unreadable expression.

 

Sei’s decision was smooth, immediate. “I will arrange it.”

 

The call didn’t last much longer than that. Sei might have said something else, and Shuzo might have replied. But the important thing was done – and Shuzo’s brain filtered the rest.

 

He hung up.

 

Something cool and plastic nudged against his hand. Izuki. Water. “Thanks.”

 

“Was that Akashi?”

 

“It was.”

 

Izuki nodded. Light gleamed off the sweat beading in his dark hair. He looked away from Shuzo, down the path. The lunch hour was getting underway; a small group of people in office clothes were wandering up from the south entrance. Laughter drifted into the still air in the pavilion.

 

A non-sequitur. Izuki said, “Does it get better?”

 

The website article had suggested ways to cope. It had said, reassuringly, kindly: _The final step is to turn the situation around. Many disowned children finally graduate school, find good jobs, and accomplish many things now that the negativity of their parents is no longer in their lives._

Shuzo unscrewed the cap on the water bottle. Lifted it to his mouth. The water was cool. The ceiling of the pavilion, filling his vision as it did in the moment that he tilted his head up to drink, was the same ceiling that he and Kou and Sachi had lain on their backs, exhausted, to stare at all those years ago. Kou had believed Sachi when she said she saw a poisonous spider in the corner of the roof, jumped up, and stumbled out of the pavilion, shouting for their mother. Sachi laughed until Shuzo flicked her hard on the forehead. And then she tackled him to the ground.

 

Their father, tugging them apart while Kaa-san demonstrated to twelve-year-old Kou that there were no poisonous spiders in the pavilion – no spiders at all – had said: “Don’t fight. Shuzo, you should know better. Sachi, be nice.”

 

Shuzo hadn’t thought of this memory for a long time.

 

Izuki was waiting for an answer.

 

What had it been like, for him, Shuzo thought, almost dispassionate. What had Izuki’s parents said? How systematic had it been – their son’s removal from the house in which he had grown up – his physical presence, his material belongings?

 

How had Izuki responded to it all? This outward state of calm, of normality, it might be reflected in his inward state of mind. Or it might not be. It was a question Shuzo could pose but not answer. Nijimura Shuzo and Izuki Shun were, in the end, virtual strangers to each other.

 

It would probably have been better if Shuzo had not agreed to the meeting.  

 

He ensured that his grip on the bottle remained ordinary. When he spoke, he met Izuki’s gaze. It was only fair. “We just have to turn it around.”

 

It wasn’t an answer. But it was a method.

 

What the fuck else could anyone give?

 

 

 

Seijuro said into his phone, “Yes, Father, I will see you at the house in the morning before my match.”

 

On his laptop screen, Shintaro had made a move on the online shogi board. Seijuro assessed it, his father’s voice put to the back of his mind. It was only a series of already-anticipated instructions. Takayama-san would pick him up from the train station. After the match at the Japan Shogi Association’s Tokyo head office, and after meeting with Shuzo, Seijuro was to attend a client dinner with his father and Akashi Corporation’s CFO, Sawada-san.

 

The talk of Akashi Corporation – Seijuro allowed it to pass. Disagreements with his father were more usefully conducted in person, and at appropriate times. Seijuro was currently engaged in a prior commitment made to Shintaro.

 

He made a move.  

 

There was no response from Shintaro for approximately three minutes. And then his former teammate conceded the game.

 

A chat window opened up at the bottom of the screen. Seijuro shifted his computer into a more comfortable position on his lap, stretched out his legs. His feet were becoming numb. His bedsheets crinkled with the movement.

 

Late afternoon light coated the floor. His bed, this year, was situated directly opposite from the window that opened out from his room into the corridor outside. At this time, the corridor was not devoid of people. Seijuro could see the backs of two of his kouhai, outlined against the blue sky. They were lounging by the low wall running alongside the corridor. Toshiyuki and Masaru. Respectively the power forward and shooting guard in Seijuro’s current line-up, and his first choices for the positions of captain and vice-captain after the Inter-High.

 

That the passage of time should evoke nostalgia was an expected thing. That it should occasion discomfort –

 

Seijuro directed his focus to Shintaro’s terse writing in the chat window. Shintaro often liked to discuss games shortly after they were concluded. It aided his progress. Certainly, a conversation in that vein would be a more functional use of time than needless dwelling on an unchangeable law of the universe.

 

Shintaro’s opening sentence, however, did not concern shogi.

 

Seijuro blinked.

 

His friend had written: Will you be in Tokyo for Nijimura-senpai’s birthday?

 

It had not come to Seijuro’s attention that Shintaro was aware of the birthdays of anyone but his immediate family and Takao Kazunari. He allowed his fingers to hover above the keyboard as he formulated a reply.

 

Shintaro wrote, tetchily, as if he had guessed Seijuro’s train of thought: It was not of my concern, but that idiot Kise has conjured into his empty head the idea of –

 

A ringtone cut through the still air. Repeated once. Then another time. Vibrations creased Seijuro’s pillow. He paused in watching the progression of Shintaro’s words across the chat window, picked up his phone from the pillow, and checked his messages.

 

It was Ryota. Akashicchi, he wrote.

 

I got Takao to blackmail Midorimacchi into asking you,

 

but I don’t trust him so –

 

Shintaro was still typing.

 

Seijuro’s phone rang again. He put it on vibrate. Ryota had sent another message: No one remembered my birthday two weeks ago!

 

(A succession of eight emoticons meant to express sadness.)

 

I was depressed, and then I remembered that my birthday, and Midorimacchi’s, and Nijimura-senpai’s are all really close, and I haven’t seen you guys for ages – (more distressed emoticons) –

 

because it’s _third year_ and we have _exams_ and so I thought –

 

Shintaro’s final two sentences loomed with disapproval, despite the absence of miniature pictorial representations of his current facial expression three and a half hours away in Tokyo. He wrote: Kise wishes to meet on the Sunday. If you could communicate an invitation to Nijimura-senpai, it would be appreciated.

 

The word ‘appreciated’ dripped with the force with which Shintaro must have exercised his irritation upon his keyboard.

 

And then, less disapproving, if just as curt: if Nijimura-senpai does not wish to attend, Kise will understand.

 

Unspoken: Shintaro would impress it upon him with potentially physical force.

 

Ryota’s last message: Please, please, please, please, please come, Akashicchi!

 

To smile, at Shintaro’s discomfited attempt to balance irritation with consideration, at Ryota’s combination of childish selfishness and unconditional welcome, was not the most rational of reactions. Seijuro set his phone aside, onto the white-and-blue Rakuzan-issue sheets, and closed the lid of his laptop. A response could wait.

 

Ryota’s birthday had been on the eighteenth of this month. Seijuro had sent a polite message accompanied by a gift in the post, even if Ryota had seemingly forgotten both gestures in his desire to orchestrate a team reunion. Shintaro’s birthday was on the seventh of July, the coming Thursday. Shuzo’s, three days later, was directly on the Sunday that Ryota had picked.

 

Seijuro had of course been already aware. The request Shuzo had made of him the day before – in an apparent state of stress; Seijuro’s humour cooled sharply at the memory – had not been difficult to grant, because of the fact that such a trip to Tokyo had already been planned. A full weekend. An official shogi match, a necessary discussion with Seijuro’s father, and a possible lunch with Shintaro and dinner with Shuzo.

 

The changes in the predicted circumstances were easily adapted into Seijuro’s plans.

 

In light of that, then, this continued sensation of unease was unjustifiable.

 

That its inception dated back to Chihiro’s visit a little over a week ago, or even further before that, to Iwakura Yukari’s unfortunate death –

 

Grief was an understandable thing. Discomfort. Seijuro had not been unduly intimate with Iwakura-san, but they had been colleagues, in the student council, the shogi club. They had been yearmates. He had respected her quick mind and sharp tongue.

 

And the assertions she had made in her letter – had brought about an unsought but nonetheless wholly necessary discovery about himself.

 

The logical next step to take was simply –

 

To act.

 

The light was beginning to inch back across the floor. The beginning of evening. Footsteps scraped in the corridor outside. Toshiyuki’s and Masaru’s voices raised, became audible. A joke. A decision to get popsicles from the school convenience store.

 

The wall at Seijuro’s back was solid, smooth. He folded his legs, his arms, let his eyes close. The air-conditioner above the desk blew cold air gently into his face.

 

That the passage of time – that the knowledge of inevitable, irreversible change – should evoke nostalgia was an expected thing.

 

Uncertainty, however, was not an emotion to which Seijuro was accustomed. The question of where he would go from here; the answer had always been, before this, a sound both clear and uncorrupted. The settling of a shogi piece upon the board; the curving of a teammate’s hands around a perfectly passed ball.

 

Nonetheless. He was Akashi Seijuro. 

 

 

 

 

The car pulled up in the driveway. Takayama-san got out, opened the door. Seijuro inclined his head in his father’s direction. “Then,” he said, politely. “I’ll see you tomorrow evening, Father.”

 

His father’s mouth thinned, but he nodded. “Win your match, Seijuro.”

 

Yuuto-oji-san, leaning against one of the Western-style pillars in the porch of the house, made an irritated sound. “Good luck with your match,” he said. When his brother looked at him, Yuuto-oji-san turned his head away.

 

“I’m confident your dinner with Iemochi Group will go well,” Seijuro said.

 

Yuuto-oji-san said, “Why do I even try?” His hands came out from the pockets of his dark green trenchcoat. “Have fun with your boyfriend. And at your party tomorrow. Don’t get drunk and smash something. Come home in time to feed your own pets for once. The tortoise, and the puppy, and the fish –” His face twisted. A break in the train of thought.

 

Seijuro attempted to comprehend the notion of smashing something while drunk.

 

“I’m going to find rational company now.” The knob of the front door met Yuuto-oji-san’s hand. Wood slid across marble. The door closed. Seijuro and his father were left alone on the porch. The slip-and-fall of fountain water threaded through the quiet. The sky was clouded.

 

Seijuro bowed to his father again. Briefly. And turned to the car. Takayama-san took a step back.

 

Father’s tone was measured. “I’ve accepted your decision not to succeed me at the company, Seijuro, despite your lack of any clear alternative plans for your future.”

 

They had already discussed this, in the enclosed space of Seijuro’s father’s office, surrounded by dark mahogany cabinets and marble floor. As a discussion, it had gone both better and worse than Seijuro had expected. He had not found himself disowned. But neither had his father approved. It did not matter. Seijuro did not require approval. He controlled his temper. Waited for his father to arrive at the point.

 

“You will not disappoint me.”

 

A warning, or an assertion. Seijuro refused to allow his grip on the strap of his backpack to tighten. His expression remained neutral.

 

His father went back inside the house.

 

Takayama-san was waiting, a silent presence as he had been for all of Seijuro’s childhood.

 

The shogi match began at nine in the morning and ended at three in the afternoon. Seijuro resigned at the one-hundredth move. His opponent, a Waseda second-year student named Kasai Akiho, bowed to him after the game, commented that he hoped that they would have the opportunity to play again.

 

Seijuro had been defeated before. Defeat was part of the process toward eventual, absolute victory. He could not have learned shogi as a child without being defeated by the young woman who his father had hired to teach him the basics of the game – Nakasawa-san; Seijuro remembered her name and face only vaguely. Just as he could not have learned how to play basketball without encountering losses in the playground, on street courts, in his first year at Teiko. Defeat was a stepping stone. It was not an ultimate definition.

 

Iwakura-san must have thought the same way. In the same way as Seijuro, she had been taught from an early age to win. To carry the family name.

 

It occurred to Seijuro that before joining Rakuzan, before being placed in the same environment as Seijuro, it was most likely that Iwakura-san had always been at the top of her class, the victor in every shogi match she played, the president of clubs and the student council.

 

_And then there were the enemies. And they won. Maybe they cheated. Maybe they won fairly. But they won, over and over again._

When Seijuro was very young, there had been a time when he became sick. It had been shortly after his mother died, a few months since his father stopped eating dinner in the house or coming to Seijuro’s bedroom to switch off the lights and inquire about the day’s activities. The home tutors had increased his workload, Nakasawa-san had been dismissed to enable Seijuro to improve on his own, and Seijuro had escaped from his room one morning to hide in the garden.

 

It was early July. School had ended for the summer vacation. The rainy season was well underway.

 

Seijuro had been an intelligent, resourceful child. When the storm came, and the house staff increased their efforts to find him, he stayed hidden. The koi pond in the back garden; his mother had pointed out to Seijuro once, when he was four years old, that the thicket of uncut grass around the pond would be a good place for someone to hide. Her expression at the time had been indulgent. Possibly, she had envisioned a future game of hide-and-seek, or a safe space for a teenager needing time away from overbearing parents.

 

When the gardener found him, Seijuro was soaked through and running a high fever. The family doctor, Naito-sensei, had mandated a week’s vacation from studying. After his bedroom door was shut, Seijuro had heard raised voices in the corridor outside. Naito-sensei, shouting at his father. It had frightened Seijuro then, then anyone could shout at his father.

 

Naito-sensei had stayed for only a few more months after that. In the December of Seijuro’s fifth year of elementary school, Seijuro’s father informed him over a cold, distant breakfast that their family doctor had moved from Tokyo to Osaka. They would be relying on Shiba Kaoru-sensei for medical advice from now on.

 

The memory, Seijuro concluded, as Takayama-san drew up in front of Shuzo’s apartment building and stopped the engine, was irrelevant to his current state of mind. His defeat at Kasai Akiho-san’s hands, Seijuro’s first loss since the age of twelve, had clearly disturbed his mind. It would be quickly remedied, and with a sufficient amount of practice combined with a review of his strategy during the match, he would secure victory on the next round.

 

It was what he had told Reo, over a year ago, at their spring training camp. Victory was not a zero-sum game. Competition continued. Skills developed. If Seijuro was absolute, it was because he made himself so.

 

If Seijuro’s mother was dead, and he was no longer the Akashi family heir – what did Father see, when he looked at him?

 

He exited the car, dismissed Takayama-san, and walked up the steps to Shuzo’s flat.

 

 

 

After a second succession of knocks failed to elicit a response from behind the wood door, Seijuro took a step back, adjusted the strap of his backpack over one shoulder, and considered the situation. It was unlikely that Shuzo had forgotten that Seijuro was due to arrive this afternoon; Seijuro’s partner was too responsible for that. In the same way, it was unusual for Shuzo to fail to answer his phone without at least a message to explain that he was in class or an otherwise inconvenient situation. Then –

 

A door further down the landing slammed open. A young man with dark hair emerged onto the landing, a phone gripped tightly in his hand. He was snapping into it, “Screw you, Yuri. I’ve made my decision. You can’t keep doing this kind of thing. Leaving a crap diary that I wrote when I was _thirteen_ in my room the last time, as if wanting to be a doctor back then has anything to do with –”

 

Seijuro recognised him, despite the change in hair colour. Hirano Keishi-san. They had met briefly just over a month ago.

 

“No,” Hirano-san said. His fingers were white-knuckled. His feet turned towards the staircase. “This is it. I know you don’t agree with my –” He cut off. One second. Two. And then his voice raised. “Forget it. Let me make myself clear. If you team up with my father and my sister to guilt-trip me again, we’re done. Do you understand that? Say you understand.”

 

The sky was still bright with afternoon. The sun, setting later and later with the onset of summer. At this time of the year, sunset in Tokyo would not be for another two hours. The vacation was set to begin in ten days.

 

“We’re not discussing this in more detail! I’m hanging up, and going to the convenience store to buy myself cheap ramen because I’m a medical school drop-out, unemployed, and without prospects –”

 

A sharp thud. Hirano-san’s foot connecting with the edge of the staircase. The metal casing of his phone pressed against his face. His back was curved, tense.

 

Seijuro said, politely, “Hirano-san.”

 

The man spun around. Sharp, smooth reflexes. And enough motor control to refrain from tripping despite the suddenness of the movement. It was possible that he played a kind of sport. “What –” His expression cleared. “You’re that kid Nijimura was talking to a few weeks back.”

 

“It’s a pleasure to meet you again,” Seijuro said. “I apologize. I neglected to introduce myself the last time we spoke. My name is Akashi Seijuro.”

 

“Hirano Keishi, Akashi –” A pause. “Akashi-kun.”

 

The sun shone above their heads. Hirano-san’s open door swung a little in the moderate breeze sweeping down the busy street. A truck coughed loudly. A car-horn depressed, the noise slicing through the air.

 

Hirano-san said, “If you’re here to see Nijimura, and he’s not answering his door, it’s probably because he’s asleep.”

 

It was half past three in the afternoon. Seijuro’s formal wear was not a good defense against the heat. He blinked a thin line of sweat from his eyes.

 

Hirano-san’s shouting into the phone had been ill-considered in its volume and content. His interjection into Seijuro’s conversation with Shuzo a month previous had been crude, clumsy. In light of these first and second impressions, the man’s gaze, as dark as the natural colour of his hair, was unexpectedly piercing. His tone was blunt. “He’s sleeping a lot these days. Did something happen with him?”

 

Shuzo’s voice over the phone the week before: Is this a bad time? It’s a lot to ask – could you come down to Tokyo sometime –

 

Seijuro refused to allow himself to tense. Control was necessary. Seijuro had kept a hold on his temper even when Father became provocative during their discussion earlier that morning. He had maintained the neutrality of his expression when conceding the game to Kasai-san not twenty minutes ago.

 

This insistent unease – like ink clinging to the bones of his ribs inside his chest, like sandpaper scraping away at the end of every nerve and stray thought – he had trained himself to ignore it over the past month.

 

Hirano-san’s face shifted, became closed. He folded his arms over his chest. His dark red Waseda T-shirt crinkled under the contact. “I have to go. If you want to wait in my room –”

 

“That won’t be necessary,” Seijuro said. Hirano-san was, after all, an unknown entity. His tone remained even, courteous. “Thank you for the offer.”

 

The man nodded. Started down the staircase. Halfway onto the third step, he turned back briefly and delivered a statement for which there was no ostensible purpose. “Nijimura’s strange, but he’s a good kid.”

 

His back receded.

 

Seijuro considered the door in front of him again. The peach-coloured paint on the old wood was cracked in places. The number plate gleamed metallic in the sun.

 

Seijuro turned, set his bag down by the low wall running alongside the landing, and withdrew his headphones and a shogi book.

 

His phone vibrated in the pocket of his blazer. He loosened his tie with one hand, reached for the device with the other.

 

A message from Ryota: Remember, Akashicchi! The restaurant’s booked for tomorrow at twelve. We have a private room and everything! And cake! (Several cake, party hat, and smiling emoticons.)

 

Shuzo had agreed to the combined birthday party, when Seijuro communicated the invitation to him on the previous Sunday. His tone had been more or less disinterested.

 

Seijuro put his phone away. Removed his blazer and folded it across his lap. Opened his book to the thirtieth page and began to read.

 

 

 

At five o’clock, Shuzo opened the door. They looked at one another. Seijuro observed his partner’s sleep-mussed hair, strained expression. Shuzo’s gaze narrowed, and then his face blanked. “Oh shit. Fuck.”

 

“I entertained myself,” Seijuro said.

 

Shuzo glanced down the landing. Back at Seijuro. He ran a hand through his hair, hunched his shoulders. His grey shirt, formal with a starched collar, was wrinkled. The tails hung out from his dark pants. “How long have you been waiting here?”

 

Seijuro’s book shut. Slid into his bag. The floor shifted beneath his feet. “It is of little importance. If I may enter –”

 

He left his shoes in the entryway. Shuzo closed the door behind him. The dimness of the room presented a shadowed, airless contrast to the landing outside. Shuzo moved past Seijuro. The bed dipped. The windows opened. A breeze lifted the thin yellow curtains. Sunlight crept across the floor.

 

“You can leave your stuff anywhere,” Shuzo said. Sitting with one leg folded beneath him on the bed. “You’re only staying tonight, right? And there’s that party Kise’s organising tomorrow –”

 

Shuzo’s tone was even, practical.

 

There was no reason for it to evoke irritation in Seijuro. A flash of heightened emotion. He had immersed himself in the clear, complicated world of shogi for nearly an hour and a half. His thinking was calm, organised, cold.

 

He didn’t allow himself to speak. If he did, it was possible he would snap. Speak more harshly than the situation warranted. That would be unproductive. Instead, he turned from Shuzo, set his bag down by the desk. Textbooks were scattered over the wood surface. The lamp was switched off.

 

Shuzo had stopped speaking. A pause ensued. And then: “How did your match go?”

 

“I conceded,” Seijuro said. There was no need to elaborate. Father had always been impatient of excuses. Defeat was just that. Simply defeat.

 

The tatami mats rustled. Keys swept up off the table, dislodged a few pens from a precarious position at the edge of the desk. Shuzo caught them, dropped them safely next to the unlit desk lamp. The metallic blue of the lamp gleamed in the late afternoon light. “Let’s go out for dinner. I can’t be bothered to cook.”

 

Seijuro looked at him.

 

Shuzo was very close to him. His gaze was a steel grey. Earlier, it had been clouded by sleep, fatigue. Now, the colour had smoothed, become flat and dark. The top two buttons of his wrinkled formal shirt were open, exposed pale neck and the jut of collarbones.

 

Shuzo cleared his throat. Coughed. “We should eat first. It’s a little early, but – fast food? There’s the ramen place across the street if you don’t mind something cheap.”

 

“That is fine,” Seijuro said. Directed his line of sight at the blazer he had hung over Shuzo’s desk chair. “If we are to go somewhere casual, however, perhaps it would be better to change.”

 

Shuzo blinked at him. And then glanced down at himself. “Shit. I slept in this. After that fuck-up of an interview –”

 

The internship interview with Iemochi Group’s consulting arm. Seijuro unbuttoned his own shirt. Removed a more suitable set of clothing from his bag. Inquired, “Your interview did not go well.”

 

A drawer opened, shut. Clothing hit the ground. Shuzo’s voice was briefly muffled. “I screwed it,” he said, succinctly if less than clearly. “The interviewer was some seedy-looking guy. Kept asking irrelevant personal questions –”

 

The ramen shop was narrow, overly warm. The shop owner appeared to know Shuzo. A pleasant-enough man with a loud voice incongruous with his small stature, Tsuda-san was pleased to meet a friend of Shuzo’s, gave them a free plate of karaage.

 

The bowls of noodles steamed gently into the air. He and Shuzo constitued two of only three customers sitting at the long wooden counter in front of the chef’s cooking space. It was early for the dinner hour. Seijuro picked his chopsticks up.

 

Shuzo said, without ceremony, spoon twisting once in his hand, “So you lost.”

 

Tsuda-san had left them to serve his third customer, a middle-aged man wearing a work suit and a harassed expression. 

 

“Yes, Shuzo,” Seijuro said, patiently.

 

“You’re okay with that.”

 

His earlier, unexplained irritation spiked again. Ink clinging to his ribs; sand in his mind, the back of his throat. “Eventual victory is inevitable.”

 

“It’s not like you haven’t lost before,” Shuzo observed. His spoon set down on the counter between them. A barely audible clang of metal. It was an inexpensive spoon. Stainless steel instead of ceramic.

 

Seijuro had not been defeated since he was old enough that it became impermissible. Unjustifiable. He met Shuzo’s gaze.

 

His partner didn’t flinch. “You told me that what Yamada did to you was a loss.” Sharp. “Not that I agreed then, or agree now, but you counted it as a defeat.”

 

Kasai-san had been courteous in victory. Perfectly so. His greetings to Seijuro afterwards had been impersonal if warm in tone. Unlike Tetsuya two years ago, Kasai-san had no real emotional investment – even if he did have a professional one – in personally defeating Seijuro. A shogi match was a shogi match. There was no point that Kasai-san was attempting to make.

 

“And Teiko was a loss. Not yours alone, but it was a resounding one. A lot of people screwed up. And –” A shrug.

 

Father had said that morning: You will not disappoint me.

 

A warning. An assertion.

 

If Seijuro’s mother was dead, if he was not the successor his father had hoped for –

 

He could not keep replaying Iwakura-san’s words in his head. Each sentence, memorised. Their resonating, incomprehensible _significance_ –

 

 _The loss_ , Iwakura-san had written, _has to be a judgement of who you are, your worth as a person. If you lose, you don’t deserve to exist._

Shuzo was still speaking, even, practical, as he had been speaking earlier, when he let Seijuro into his apartment. The bed had been creased from long hours of occupancy. Shuzo, sleeping for long, unusual periods of time, as Hirano-san had said. The desk had been its owner’s customary combination of chaos and logic.

 

A layer of caution had crept into that evenness, that practicality. Seijuro’s partner, responding to Seijuro’s unusual quiet. “Sei –”

 

Seijuro asked him the same question that he had asked Chihiro. But while his question to Chihiro had been honest, his tone controlled, his speech to Shuzo now was cutting. “Do you believe that the sum of an individual is his accomplishments?”

 

The silence dripped. Tsuda-san set a bowl of ramen in front of his third customer, turned back to the sink and twisted the tap closed. He wiped his hands on his apron.

 

Shuzo said, as Chihiro had done, but with more focused neutrality, “Do you believe it? That’s the important –”

 

Seijuro did not permit him to finish. He came down from his seat. The ceramic floor squeaked. Tsuda-san kept it very clean. Seijuro looked Shuzo in the face. Those clear, dark grey eyes. Non-judgemental, as they had been when Seijuro first met a second-year team captain five years ago. The eye of the storm, and the storm itself.

 

Seijuro had cared for Shuzo long before attraction had become a facet of their relationship.

 

The quality of his regard – much like that of Seijuro’s family doctor when he was in his fifth year of elementary school, in the year of his mother’s death.

 

“Is it reasonable,” he said. “That I would not believe it. That it would be a simple matter, to change my thinking. When I do not, myself, understand what an alternative answer would be.”

 

This was not the place to be having this discussion. Sunlight fingered its way across the clean floor. The middle-aged customer had lifted the entire bottle of sake to his lips and was drinking, long and deep. Outside, the noise of vehicles moving past, the sound of footsteps and children’s voices – students coming home from extra-curricular clubs, from _juku_ – swelled into the dim spaces in between steam and the more solid presences of counter, utensils, Shuzo’s shadow and the line of his mouth.

 

Ink in his bones. Sand in his mouth. Shintaro the tortoise, crawling across the dark wood of the desk where Seijuro had spent his childhood years studying, sunlight pressing against the glass of his bedroom window. Ryota and Daiki, playing chase in the garden where he had hidden, unwilling to go inside even when the sky cracked open and the world turned itself out, water instead of light, thunder instead of air. Atsushi the hamster sleeping on top of Tetsuya the Thirtieth’s tank, in the hallway next to the large, empty dining room. After the Rakuzan third-years had graduated, Seijuro had brought them home. Shintaro, Ryota, Daiki, Atsushi, Tetsuya. It hadn’t felt appropriate, to keep them in Rakuzan when their primary caretakers there had gone.

 

Seijuro breathed. A wind picked at the heavy red curtains hanging in front of the store. The air was very still.

 

It was a numbing thing to realize. How _angry_ he was.

 

He was Akashi Seijuro.

 

The meaning of it, intolerably, unforgivably, escaped him.

 

“Sei,” Shuzo said. Metal creaked. The stool. Dark sneakers, striped blue, joined Sei’s on the floor. Shadows mingled. Shuzo blocked out the sun.

 

Seijuro hadn’t cried since the age of five, when a high fever woke him in the night and he went to his parents’ room, pillow in hand, almost tripping on the stairs between his wing of the house and theirs.

 

He maintained a hold on his self-control now. There was no reason why he should not.

 

Shuzo’s hand on his arm. It was grounding.

 

 

 

Shadow shifted on the tatami mats. Sei, changing into a dark blue shirt that Shuzo had seen him wear to bed countless times at Rakuzan. His crimson hair was darker, almost black, in the scarcity of light that surrounded them, boxed them inside away from passing cars and the whisk and splash of water puddles in the street outside. At six o’clock, after they had finished eating ramen, Sei had agreed to an impromptu tour of Waseda’s campus. Thirty minutes later, it had started to rain. They had sheltered in one of the school canteens until the storm let up, and then come back here, to Shuzo’s apartment.

 

Sei’s temper had been controlled, seemingly calm, since his moment of helpless fury in the ramen shop.

 

Shuzo ran a towel through his own wet hair one more time. “You can use the shower now,” he said.

 

“Thank you, Shuzo.”

 

The bathroom door opened, shut.

 

Shuzo reached for the drawer of the cabinet by the desk. His fingers tensed, involuntarily. Sei’s expression, in the ramen shop. More accurately, his lack of expression. The deliberately even tone in which he had asked Shuzo that question: “Do you believe that the sum of an individual is his accomplishments?”

 

What a stuffy way to phrase a question like that. But it was Sei.

 

He got dressed. Pulled out his desk chair and sat down. The wheels caught on the tatami mats. The desk light flicked on, cast a limited space of light across Shuzo’s books, his laptop, the floor. It was three o’clock in the morning in L.A. now.

 

The box his mother had sent him; it sat unopened in the bottom of Shuzo’s closet. As it had done for over a week now.

 

A breath. A second one. He closed his eyes briefly. Afterimages burned in the sudden darkness. Distracting Sei, giving him time to compose himself –

 

Shuzo had forgotten.

 

Water started in the shower. Heat and pressure. Someone was singing in the street below. A girl. Her voice was quickly joined by another. A deeper, male one. They were probably both drunk.

 

Solidity settled into the corners of the room. The spaces. The box, hidden from sight, was the most solid presence of all.

 

Tatsuya had said, kindly, for him, that Shuzo should just open it. There would be nothing in there that might be unexpected. Old clothes, childhood toys, photographs – what could Shuzo’s mother have put in a box and posted to him that might matter more than the already-established fact of his disowning?

 

Sei was here.

 

The desk pushed off beneath his hand. The chair slid back. The wardrobe door opened with some difficulty – an ancient thing – and the box landed with a thump on the lit area of the floor. Its shadow radiated outward, mingled with Shuzo’s.

 

He ripped the tape off. The sound was uglier than he had expected. Sharp and loud.

 

What was the sum of a person?

 

Shuzo imagined he could hear the beat of his own pulse. The blood beating in his head.

 

In the end, it came down to – accomplishments. Sei was right on that front. But that wasn’t the only component of an identity. What you’d done, who you knew – your family, your friends – what you believed in and worked to achieve – Shuzo had arrived at this conclusion a long time ago. His parents had married young, just out of high school. Tou-san had been thirty-five when he died, surrounded by family in a white-walled hospital eight thousand, eight hundred and ten kilometres from the city where he had grown up. (In a fit of morbidity, Sachi had looked this up, and mentioned it in her eulogy at the funeral. Kaa-san had almost slapped her afterwards.) At that age, Tou-san had accomplished little, by the standards of the world. An acceptable but not outstanding degree, a middle-class job as a journalist at a little-known magazine. A house in the suburbs that he had had to leave to seek treatment in America. Three children from a marriage that had failed to survive two years of illness. When Nijimura Naoto died, it was unlikely that more than a small circle of people would remember him. His family, a nurse or two, a few coworkers.

 

Shuzo had needed justification. Assurance, of his father’s worth as a person.

 

It was as Tatsuya had predicted. Clothes, toys, photographs. Books. An old laptop from way-back-when that Kaa-san could really just have thrown out. 

 

Shuzo picked up one of the photographs. It was from Teiko. A graduation photo. Seikiguchi was there – he hadn’t seen the bastard since their last Inter-High, when Sekiguchi had said only that he had ended things with Yamada, after the sex – video – thing. Shuzo’s fingers tightened on the photo. Kubota was in there too. Hasegawa. Kitamura. Other people whose names and faces blurred in his memory.

 

Another photo. Taken with the basketball starting line-up before the third-years left. Sei’s fourteen-year-old self looked out from the captured moment. A solemn expression. A barely detectable tension in crimson eyes. The gold hadn’t been there yet. The heterochromatic gaze that Shuzo had returned to.

 

Midorima too, pushing his glasses up his nose. Kise, hanging onto Aomine and Kuroko with a clinginess that was more insecure than childishly deliberate. Murasakibara, less huge than he was now.

 

Shuzo had taken these photographs, with the Generation of Miracles, and, months later, with Sekiguchi and Kubota and the others, and then he had walked away. Cowardice or necessity – as Tatsuya would say, even if it was just as a loyal friend, Shuzo had been little more than a child then. A year older than Sei. And he had had his own problems.

 

The photographs were set aside. Remembered and forgotten faces, places long left behind – at once gleaming in electric light and fading into inky darkness in the half-shade cast by the cardboard box.

 

The next thing that Shuzo picked up was a ping pong bat. The handle fit easily in his hand. The rubbet sheet on one side was torn. He gave it an experimental swing. Attempted to spin the bat over and under the palm of his hand. It slipped from his grip, bounced off the edge of the box and lay on the floor.

 

Tou-san had taught them to play ping-pong. Shuzo, Sachi, and Kou. He had taught them for four months in Shuzo’s first year of high school, when Shuzo’s hair was still dyed a shade of blond he winced to think about now, and Sachi and Kou were holding on with childish stubbornness to a prank war they had begun at Christmas the year before.

 

Shuzo had always suspected afterwards, that at that time, Tou-san had already known he was sick. That he and Kaa-san had chosen to keep it from them, in a combination of concern for their well-being and a naïve hope that the initial treatment would work and there would be no need to tell them at all.

 

Shuzo hadn’t played since his second year of high school.

 

His head felt heavy, his skin overly warm. Shuzo’s hand lifted, automatically, abortively. The solidity in the apartment, internalized in the form of an immovable narrowness in Shuzo’s chest, a coldness in his blood – it amplified, along with a knife-sharp awareness of the mechanics of his breathing, the friction of the mat beneath his crossed legs, the limited light cast by the desk lamp.

 

The water had stopped in the bathroom. The door swung outwards. White tiles gleamed briefly, before being plunged into darkness. Seijuro’s hand left the switch. He had changed in the bathroom. His hair dripped water onto the neck of his white T-shirt. His feet stopped. “Shuzo.”

 

He wasn’t crying. Thank fuck he wasn’t crying.

 

Aside from kissing, or sex, Sei didn’t generally initiate casual contact. Shuzo had never really minded. Sei was Sei. And it was not as if Shuzo needed physical demonstrations of affection. He would have probably resented a partner who was clingy.

 

The shadows on the floor mingled. Darkness spread. A familiar touch settled on the back of his neck, slid upwards into his hair.

 

The box had been shifted gently to the side. The photographs were in the full glare of the lamp now. Names and faces. Places long left behind. The light wood handle of the ping pong bat shone. A puddle splashed outside, and someone cursed.

 

The world, Shuzo had thought many months ago, as he looked into his mother’s face across an ordinary-sized kitchen, on an ordinary spring afternoon – was bigger than this.

 

This room, this apartment – it existed beneath a summer night sky that was at once larger and smaller than the breath of space between him and Sei; the twenty-minute bus ride to the Tokyo suburbs; the eight thousand eight hundred and ten kilometres across the North Pacific Ocean. The temporal, irreclaimable distance between Shuzo’s thirteen-year-old self in his first year of high school, and the nineteen-year old legal adult that he was now.

 

In this large, small world, Shuzo said into the not-soundless, not-empty quiet, “Three months – it’s a long time to wait. To send something like this.”

 

The box was still open. Its contents largely unpacked. Sei fitted himself easily against his side. A simple, assertive presence. 

 

“I wanted that to mean something.”

 

He wasn’t that impractical, or naïve. Hell, Sachi and Kou weren’t –

 

His voice was calmer than he’d thought it would be. “It probably doesn’t.”

 

Acceptance, the guidance counsellor at his school in America, in the weeks after his father’s death, was an important stage.

 

 

 

The party was exactly the combination of irritating and hilarious that Shuzo had thought it would be. Kise was high on sugar, idiocy, and sentimental emotions. Midorima alternated between grumpiness as the forced reunion with his teammates and occasional flashes of contentment that were quickly suppressed once anyone was stupid enough – usually Kise or Aomine – to point them out. Aomine and Kagami competed to see who could eat more birthday cake and Maji burgers and fries, in that order. Murasakibara stuffed himself methodically and without concern for anyone else. And Sei and Kuroko watched, the former tolerantly and the latter with judgmental indifference.

 

The gathering began small, just Shuzo’s Teiko juniors, Kagami, and Shutoku’s Takao Kazunari – and got gradually bigger, spilling out from Maji Burger to the street courts in the park across the way. Kise bullied various senpai and kouhai from Kaijo into showing up; the senpai coincidentally brought along new university teammates who happened to be graduates from Shutoku or Touou or Seirin or even Yosen; and Sei relented in the face of continued whining and invited Mibuchi, whose university was located at a nearby campus. And once Mibuchi knew about it –

 

Mayuzumi dropped his bag by the wire netting surrounding the pair of street courts. Nodded curtly in Shuzo’s direction, and began ripping the plastic off a new light novel.

 

Shuzo leaned back against the netting. He had switched out with Shutoku’s – now Tokyo Science University’s Miyaji Yuya just ten minutes ago. “You said hello to Sei already?”

 

“He’s the emperor,” Mayuzumi said, without looking up from his books. “Obviously I had to give my greetings.”

 

“What did Mibuchi have to do to get you to come?”

 

“Threaten to come to my school.”

 

Miyaji Yuya’s older brother, Miyaji Kiyoshi, threw a pineapple – Shuzo paused to make certain, yes, it was a fucking _pineapple_ – at Midorima’s head. Takao, on the sidelines, bent over with laughter.

 

Mayuzumi ducked his head. His pale hair looked darker in the shade of the trees above them, their branches inching above the wire netting. “A filler chapter in a manga,” he muttered. “A bloody epilogue oneshot.”

 

On the court, Sei stood above Kagami. The latter was sprawled on the ground. Sei walked around him, lifted the basketball in his hands, aimed, and shot. The ball swished through the net. Sei turned his back on Kagami, walked back towards the other side of the court.

 

Kuroko, standing at the outer line just behind the net, said, “Kagami-kun, you should be better at that by now.”

 

It was irrational, the urge to laugh. It wasn’t as if this was any greater amount of crazy than Shuzo normally had to deal with. Sei and Tatsuya, Kou and Sachi, his new teammates at Waseda – they were all a bunch of irreoncilable peculiarities, moronic insecurities, and incomprehensible ideas concentrated into the shape of a person.

 

No one looked at him. Takao was already laughing at Midorima. A Shutoku and a Kaijo player were attempting to prevent Miyaji Kiyoshi from throwing another fruit, this time in Sei’s direction. Aomine and Kise had split off into another court to play one of their never-ending one-on-ones, and they had their own audience.

 

Mayuzumi had stopped turning pages. The tone of his gaze was wary.

 

Kuroko’s sneakers scraped on gravel. His voice was polite. “Nijimura-senpai, are you all right?”

 

Sei was on the other side of the court, waiting next to Mibuchi for the opposite team to get started with the basketball. His hair was bright in the sun. When he looked in Shuzo’s direction, his heterochromatic gaze, the brilliant mix of crimson and gold, edge and subtlety, was soft.

 

A person was his accomplishments. He was the people he knew – his friends, his family. He was the things he believed in, the aims he sought to achieve. And, on the same level as all of those things, just as importantly as all of those things, a person was –

 

 

 

Seijuro saw Shuzo to his apartment. Takayama-san was already waiting outside the block, car idling on the curb. The passenger windows were tinted; it was a different car from the one in which Takayama-san usually transported Seijuro for ordinary business. Seijuro wondered for a moment if his father had come. Possibly to take him to task for the defeat of the previous day.

 

Shuzo was observant. At the door to his apartment, he jerked his head in the direction of the street, and said, bluntly, “You’ll be okay?”

 

“I am always capable of handling myself,” Seijuro said.

 

“That’s not what I meant.”

 

“I will be fine, Shuzo.”

 

A moment of hesitation. And then a hand came around the back of Seijuro’s neck, grip strong but gentle, and their mouths pressed together. The fit of it was familiar, the temperature hot. Seijuro closed his fingers over Shuzo’s shoulder, the rough fabric of his jacket, and then let go.

 

They stepped apart. Shuzo’s gaze was a deep, calm grey. “Call me when you get home.”

 

It was not an exceptionally bright, or hot day. The wind was strong. The sweat on Seijuro’s skin, from the exertions of the afternoon, had cooled not soon after they left the gathering. His mind was clear. “Of course. Have a good evening.”

 

A nod, and then the door closed. Neither of them were devoted to ceremony.

 

The cement floor scraped under Seijuro’s shoes.

 

Hirano-san stopped on the second step from the top of the staircase. He blinked at Seijuro. “Akashi-kun.”

 

“Hirano-san.”

 

The older man was wearing a formal white shirt. Grey blazer. Dark tie. An office bag was gripped in his right hand. He caught Seijuro’s gaze, volunteered information in the way of many of the naturally outgoing people in Seijuro’s acquaintance – Ryota, Kazunari, Kotaro. “I had some job interviews today. Low-level management stuff, mostly, while I figure out – things.”

 

Seijuro was ultimately disinterested. “I see.” And then, in acknowledgement of the fact that the man appeared to care for Shuzo’s welfare to a degree. “I am confident you will eventually arrive at a satisfactory conclusion, Hirano-san.”

 

A short laugh. “Thanks for that. Well. Things have a tendency of working themselves out in the end.”

 

Leaves slipped across the floor. A plastic beer bottle knocked against the low wall running alongside the landing. It knocked once, rolled back a little, and then – carried by the wind – knocked again into the cement. Seijuro said, the sound of his voice unexpected even to himself, “You have evidence for that assertion.”

 

Hirano-san’s hair, when dark, made his face look paler. More serious. His footsteps shifted in the direction of his front door. A key inserted into the lock. Mechanics twisted, moved together and apart. His hand on the knob, he turned back to look at Seijuro.

 

Seijuro had been certain, for a moment, that he had decided not to answer.

 

The plastic beer bottle rolled back, forward. The sound was single, repeated, alone.

 

When Hirano-san spoke, his tone was ironic, “People are complicated. Situations are complicated. But, eventually, in resolving anything – what you decide is most important. I learned that a long time ago. And it took me six years to remember that I had learned it at all.”

 

Cryptic. Indirect. It tried Seijuro’s patience.

 

The knob turned. Shadows split on the edge of the landing. “I assume I’ll see you around, Akashi-kun.”

 

In the street below, the wind had stopped. A car engine rumbled. Coughed. And then stopped. Someone cursed loudly. A door slammed. An argument started.

 

Takayama-san was waiting.

 

 

 

Yuuto had spent fifteen years hating his older brother, before a combination of a young man he met in America, the child they adopted, and the passage of time and maturity enabled him to begin a process of forgiveness.

 

Nii-san was still uptight, still cold – even if he was bloody polite and undeliberate about it all – and still irritating as all hell.

 

(When Yuuto came home for the first time in fifteen years, Nii-san had hugged him at the arrivals gate in the airport. His breath had been warm in Yuuto’s ear, his grip cool but firm, as it had been since they were children.)

 

And Seijuro, less than a year old when Yuuto’s father had exiled him from the family, was painfully similar to Yuuto’s Nii-san. Even with that distinctively non-Akashi red hair and crimson-gold eyes.

 

Takayama-san had exited the car. The door across from Yuuto’s side of the car opened. The wind that had been pressing against the windows swept in, brought warm summer air and sunlight with it. The smell of ramen and baked pizza. Dust from the street.

 

Seijuro’s gaze was considering. His weight settled on the car seat. He said, politely, as the car door shut behind him, “Yuuto-oji-san. This is a surprise.”

 

Kichiro, when he appeared at the doorway – quietly, as he always did, the bastard – just as Yuuto was informing Takayama-san that he intended to come with him to pick up Seijuro, had laughed. Tilted his head, bright hair catching the sunlight, and said, “Maybe some tact would be good when you speak to him. Just a suggestion.”

 

“There’s too much tact in this household,” Yuuto had said. Takayama-san bowed, murmured something about going to get the car. Yuuto ignored him. The fountain, the summer sun, the irritation pricking under his skin. This place – he half-regretted accepting Nii-san’s invitation to move back in three months ago.

 

“You were the one,” his husband reminded him. “Who said your brother doesn’t use tact. He uses orders. Harsh words.”

 

“I didn’t say that.”

 

“Yuuto.”

 

He looked away from Kichiro’s sharp gaze. “I’ll be tactful.”

 

“ _Itterasshai_. Ah – Keiji’s astronomy club activity. I’ll pick him up from school.”

 

“ _Ittekimasu_.”

 

To his nephew, now, Yuuto said, without inflection, “You lost your match.”

 

Seijuro’s expression shifted. Became briefly more open, surprised. And then it closed. “Yes,” he said. Simply. “Kasai Akiho-san was a respectable opponent.”

 

Yuuto tended to act without thinking. Or, rather, in some part of his mind he calculated the benefits and risks of a venture, and then proceeded to ignore them. He devised some idea or framework of what he meant to achieve, and then either a changing situation or boredom forced him to change it. He had never liked to stay in one place, to do what was expected of him. In that way, he thought he was more like his mother, perhaps even Shiori-san, his brother’s wife. The Akashi family tended to have a type – well, perhaps, Seijuro’s Nijimura Shuzo-kun was different, from what Yuuto had heard of him.

 

Fifteen years ago, Yuuto and his brother had been young. Nii-san, just graduated from university and married to Shiori-san. Yuuto, in his second year at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

 

In any case, it occurred to Yuuto that he had felt a need to speak to Seijuro. And so he had come with Takayama-san to this narrow afternoon-lit street filled with the smell of ramen and pizza and oil and dust – and he had not planned exactly what he should say.

 

Seijuro was not a child for idle talk, at least when the other party was not a business client or other personage it was necessary to courteously entertain. When further conversation was not forthcoming, the boy turned his head toward the window. The pavement, passing by. A woman opened a sun umbrella. A café owner turned over the sign on his tinted glass door from ‘Open’ to ‘Closed’. A child stopped on his skateboard, tilted his face up to the clouded sky.

 

The rainy season was well underway.

 

Yuuto remembered things. He had an eidetic memory for images, words. His father had been proud of it. Of him.

 

He folded his arms over his chest. Closed his eyes. “Seijuro.”

 

“Yuuto-oji-san.”

 

“When I left – the Akashi household – it wasn’t because I was gay.”

 

A pause. His nephew appeared to be measuring a response.

 

Yuuto didn’t give him the time. With Nii-san, with Seijuro – rapid delivery of the relevant points was most important. Especially when Yuuto was Yuuto, and often he had little idea of what he truly wanted to say until he had said it. “It wasn’t because I had a boyfriend who I loved, and I didn’t want to leave him. Or something like that.” Takeshi’s name hovered on the edge of conscious thought. The half-grateful, half-wary expression on his sun-dark face. He had known Yuuto’s mind better, at the time, then Yuuto had known it himself. That he had, had proved the end of their relationship. “It wasn’t because your grandfather was a narrow-minded bigot.”

 

The leather of the seat bit into his fingers. Yuuto forced himself to loosen his grip. Folded his arms over his chest instead. His jacket was a bit too warm for the weather. In front of them, Takayama-san’s head was facing forward. The road was straight.

 

Seijuro was eighteen years old. He had inherited his father’s wavy, soft-looking hair – Yuuto’s hair, as Kichiro liked to describe it – even if the colour was different – exotic, the child’s grandfather had called it, with a hint of discomfort. Shiori-san had been less than pleased. Was her son a bird, she had demanded of Nii-san. One of the few times they argued about Nii-san’s side of the family. Normally, Shiori-san and Nii-san tried not to talk about their families at all.

 

“It was because _I_ wanted to leave,” Yuuto said.

 

“Do you believe,” his nephew said, tone entirely pleasant, “that because I have failed to meet my responsibilities at this time –”

 

“I could have met my responsibilities,” Yuuto cut in. “You can meet them. That’s not what I’m saying.”

 

“Kasai-san was an excellent but not insurmountable challenge.”

 

Seijuro didn’t sound it, as bland as his expression was, but Yuuto knew how to read the change – the lack of it. “You’re angry,” he observed.

 

Without irony. “You are my uncle.”

 

The day Yuuto left, his brother had said to him, face blank, from the entryway to the living room as Father’s study door slammed shut and Yuuto tried to work up the courage to go and pack his things. “You are running away, Yuuto. It will not be easily forgiven.”

 

“I don’t,” Yuuto had said then, focusing on the words themselves rather than the sound of his voice as he said them, less steady than it should be, “need Father to forgive me. Or you, Nii-san. I need to –”

 

To his nephew, seventeen years later: “I’m not trying to teach you anything. Or impart wisdom.”

 

Seijuro lifted his head. His gaze was calm. Air-conditioning extended its shadows between them. “It appears otherwise.”

 

Skating the line of impudence. Or bulldozing right past it.

 

Argument was pointless. Tact was pointless. Yuuto was an Akashi, in the end. He said what needed to be said.

 

The car was quiet. Airless, despite the breath from the air-conditioner vents. The sun, filtered through tinted windows, was darker than it needed to be.

 

“Seijuro. I grew up, like you, like Nii-san, needing to win. It was my inheritance. The expectation placed on me.”

 

Yuuto had said this aloud only twice before, first to a fellow university student for whom he had ostensibly given up his family – in fact, he had done it for himself, and Takeshi had known that, just as Yuuto had known it – and then to a young man he had met in America, with bright hair and a sharp, ironic smile.

 

“And then I wanted to win. At first, it was fun. Then it became boring. And then it became – tiring. More than that, I would say that it was frightening. The consequences of losing magnified themselves in my mind. I began to think that if I lost, I would lose my identity, I would –”

 

The words were as difficult to say now as they had been ten, fifteen years ago. Even if the delivery, its framework drawn from past experience, was less awkward than it had been. Yuuto’s chest felt scraped inside out. Raw, vulnerable. The first time, to Takeshi, it had been a confession. They had been friends then, not yet dating, and sitting on the steps of a classmate’s house after a party. The sky was pale and weak with the sun of early morning; empty beer cans and stamped-out cigarettes were strewn around them, crunched into the ground along with the broken, dead autumn leaves.

 

The second time – Yuuto had shouted it. At Kichiro. In a reflection of the natural drama that his now-husband tended to generate around himself, it had been raining. A storm in Boston. Kichiro had laughed.

 

“If I lost, I wouldn’t deserve to exist.”

 

Seijuro tensed. Barely perceptible. A muscle moved in his face. Yuuto didn’t pay attention. This kind of thing was hard enough to say, as it was, to someone who might as well be a stranger.

 

The seatbelt was confining. Restricting. Yuuto was looking at his nephew – Kichiro would have said that that was important – but he focused on the window past Seijuro’s shoulder. The disappearance of the line of shops, the beginning of the Tokyo skyline as the street gave way to a highway.

 

Yuuto said, “At some point, I understood. I didn’t come to the realization on a particularly special day. I had been dating my then-boyfriend for six weeks. I was in my second year of university. You had been born maybe seven months ago. I remember I was in a little café two blocks away from my campus. A popular one with the students then. Green curtains, wooden floor. Nice tea. The door shut behind a new customer. And I thought to myself: This isn’t going to end. I don’t – like who I am anymore. Dramatic, childish things like that – but they were real to me. Valid to me.”

 

“Yuuto-oji-san.” The tone was even.

 

“I thought about it. For a minute.” Abortively, he lifted a hand. To make some kind of gesture. He didn’t know what it would have been. He remembered how Kichiro’s face had darkened, when he got to this part. How angry Yuuto was sure he had been. Seijuro didn’t need to hear it. What Yuuto had considered, seriously, unforgivably, for those brief, despairing breaths taken in a booth, alone, with a cup of tea in front of him and books and papers spread on the table. “In any case. I decided that I had to leave. And it took me a long time, but –”

 

A year before returning to Japan, Yuuto had run into Naito Kazuhiro at a medical conference that a friend of his was due to speak at. Naito-sensei had invited him out for drinks after the conference. And he had confessed, something indefinably hard in his voice, that he had left his position as doctor to the Akashi family. Shiori-san was dead. Masaomi-san was colder and more distant than he had ever been. Naito-sensei had been friends with the both of them in their university days. He appreciated the trust Masaomi-san had put in him, appointing him as the family doctor a year after he had completed his trainee-ship at Tokyo University Hospital. But first had come Naito-sensei’s inability to help Shiori-san – whether or not it was true that her illness was not within his specialisation – and then there was Masaomi-san’s treatment of his young son after the death of his wife. Naito-sensei had still been in medical school when Seijuro was born, but he had watched the child grow up; he had been Seijuro’s doctor for six years. And he couldn’t –

 

Akashi Yuuto. He was who he was. More than his family, more than his eidetic memory and outstanding results in school, more than the bitter resentment he had felt against Nii-san and Father and the lonely escape that he had forged for himself.

 

Yuuto was not at peace with himself. He had not found the answers to all of his questions. On some childish level, he still blamed his brother for having failed to stop him from leaving, from having failed to attempt, even once, to contact Yuuto while he was in America – he had had to learn of Shiori-san’s death from newspapers, from an Akashi cousin who visited him in Boston.

 

“I’m a person,” he told Seijuro. The metal walls of the car pressed in. The invisible frame constructed from glass and iron. The world outside, kept away by tinted windows and leather seats. If Yuuto looked outside, tilted his head toward the sky, he knew he would see the clouds shifting, titanic, timeless, ultimately insubstantial, across the blue sky. “More than a lecture, more than an imposition of a way of thinking – I wanted you to know that. To have the option.”

 

“I was defeated in my match,” Seijuro observed. “You and Iwakura-san –” His face twisted. It was only a moment. He closed his mouth. The sentence was left incomplete.

 

Iwakura Yukari-san was the girl whose funeral Seijuro had attended one month ago. Nii-san had mentioned her name one evening, at the dinner table, a week after Seijuro had returned to Kyoto.

 

Yuuto’s resentment was deep-rooted. It was a part of him. The young man he had once been, who had sat in a green-curtained, tea-warm café and thought of a space far vaster than the one surrounding him in reality. Bright with sun, and airless. And neverending.

 

At breakfast that morning, Nii-san had put down his newspaper, and remarked, in the same tone as one might comment on the weather, that Seijuro had conceded his shogi match to his opponent, a Kasai Akiho-kun.

 

“Right,” had been Yuuto’s immediate, childish response. “On top of the fact that he told you just yesterday that he doesn’t want to be the Akashi heir-in-waiting. What are you going to do about it?”

 

Kichiro had kicked him, hard, beneath the table. Their son Keiji, twelve years old, had already gulped down his breakfast in the same way a fish might gulp water, and excused himself from the table to meet up with his friends.

 

The newspaper shifted in the breeze from the open balcony. Coffee poured into a dark brown cup.

 

Yuuto had run away before. He was not ashamed of it. It was what he had needed to do, at the time, to survive.

 

The highway ended. The wheel turned beneath Takayama-san’s hand. Right, up a gently ascending slope.

 

He had told Seijuro what his nephew needed to hear. It was likely that he should have told him a long time ago, two years ago, possibly even before that – if Yuuto had not left and stayed away – but what was done was done. And perhaps, before this loss, before Iwakura-san’s suicide – what a cold, self-interested thing, to reduce a girl’s death to this, a cog in his nephew’s wheel of life – Seijuro would not have wanted to hear it.

 

As always, then, Yuuto had done what he needed to do. Nothing more. Nothing less.

 

 

 

The sky on the far edge of winter was curved, sunless. The ground was cold and hard. Iwakura Yukari-san’s grave was one of many. Stone upon stone upon stone. Wooden plaques still in the windless air. Trees without blossoming leaves and sakura flowers leaned over the edges of the graveyard, pressed alongside its narrow paths.

 

Seijuro left the flowers in front of the tombstone. Stepped back.

 

Tetsuya said, “Congratulations on being accepted into Tokyo University, Akashi-kun.”

 

Seijuro was himself. And so he did not jump at Tetsuya’s soundless insertion of his presence into empty space. He waited a moment, and then allowed his feet to turn, acknowledge his former teammate’s greeting. “Both were expected.”

 

“Of course. Akashi-kun is Akashi-kun.”

 

“You will be attending Tokyo Gakugei University in the spring, Tetsuya.”

 

“Yes. Kagami-kun is returning to America.”

 

Seijuro had been aware. He kept track of his teammates’ activities, and the activities of those who happened to be immediately important to them. He considered the appropriate response. “I am sure you will remain in contact. As I understand, Shuzo and Tatsuya communicate rather frequently.”

 

“Akashi-kun is different,” his friend observed. There was no change in his customarily blank expression. 

 

Chihiro had been harsher about it. He had said, when he came to Rakuzan for Seijuro’s graduation along with Reo, Eikichi, Kotaro, and Shuzo, “I hate you, Akashi. Probably always will. Yamada didn’t change that. Nijimura and Iwakura didn’t change that. You didn’t change that.” And then he had hesitated. A sakura petal had landed in his pale hair, and he brushed it off, irritated. “But you’re you. I guess.”

 

Chihiro often required substantial decoding. It was not a task that was beyond Seijuro’s capabilities.

 

 _The empty shells of people that you and I have both become_ , Yukari-san had written. _I am not a toy; I was not broken._

_I am a person_. This was what Yuuto-oji-san had said.

 

At Seijuro’s graduation. He had delivered the speech from the third-years to the teachers and the school officials. His father and his uncle had been sitting in the audience. His friends had been waiting for him outside.

 

Father had said, at the entryway to the school hall, before waving Seijuro off to join Reo and the others in the courtyard outside, “You will not disappoint me.”

 

A reiteration. A warning. An assertion.

 

In some ways, Seijuro had come to understand, a reassurance.

 

Yuuto-oji-san had said, “In other words, go have fun. Don’t break anything. And so on.”

 

It was the far edge of winter. The beginning of spring. Sunlessness, windlessness, filled the spaces around them.

 

Tetsuya smiled. “Welcome back to Tokyo, Akashi-kun.”

 

Seijuro could breathe.

 

Sakura petals pressed into the ground. Hands slipped into the pockets of a crimson Waseda sweatshirt. “Sei, if you’re done, Sachi and Kou are waiting for us in the restaurant – ah, Kuroko. Congratulations on graduating. And getting into – wherever –”

 

“Tokyo Gakugei University, Nijimura-senpai,” Tetsuya said.

 

“Right. I forgot all of you were going to be in Tokyo this year. What did I do to deserve this –”

 

“Himuro-san said that you were pleased.”

 

“I am not – When the fuck did you talk to Tatsuya?”

 

In a tone that suggested it should have been obvious. “When I spoke to Kagami-kun.”

 

Shuzo pressed fingers to the bridge of his nose. Seijuro recognised the rainbow-coloured band wrapped tight around his wrist. It was several years old. A gift from another time.

 

Shuzo’s skin was cool to the touch. The crisp spring air. The shape of his fingers, bones and grip, were familiar as Seijuro’s own.

 

Tetsuya blinked at their clasped hands.

 

Shuzo’s muscles tensed. A breath. And then he relaxed. Continued speaking to Tetsuya. “Whatever Tatsuya said. He was probably drunk. Or obsessing about the next game. Or something. Where is Midorima going again?”

 

“That was an unsubtle change of subject, Nijimura-senpai.”

 

“Stop judging me, brat.”

 

“Please don’t hit me, senpai. Midorima-kun is also going to Tokyo University.”

 

Iwakura Yukari-san’s name, in kanji, was white and permanent upon the smooth black of her gravestone.

 

Clouds moved across the sky, titanic, timeless, ultimately insubstantial.

 

He was Akashi Seijuro.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Nijimura makes reference to a website giving advice to disowned children. Some sentences were lifted wholesale while others were modified. This is that website: https://difficulty-life-challenges.knoji.com/how-to-cope-after-being-disowned-by-your-parents/


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